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Fried Trout
(Trota fritta) Small and young trouts are best for frying.
Scale, clean, wash and wipe. Then dip in flour and fry like the other fish in oil or in butter. Serve with browned parsley and lemon. 177
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know how to fry a fish. The gaps worth filling are the fat, the flour, and what "browned parsley" actually means.
- Size and yield"Small and young" means pan-size trout of roughly 8-12 oz each, one per person. Larger fish will not cook through before the skin scorches; fillet those instead and shorten the time.
- ScalingTrout scales are fine and cling. Work under cold running water or in a sink of water with the back of a knife, tail to head, then rinse the body cavity out thoroughly.
- The flour coatDry the fish very well before flouring, season the flour with salt and pepper, and flour only just before the fish goes into the fat. Flour left sitting on damp skin turns to paste and slides off in the pan.
- Fat and heatEnough oil or butter to come a third of the way up the fish, at 350-360F. Butter alone will brown before the trout is done; a mix of butter and oil, or clarified butter, holds up better. Roughly 4-5 minutes a side for a 10 oz fish, until the flesh at the backbone is opaque.
- Browned parsleyAlmost certainly fried parsley, prezzemolo fritto: sprigs of parsley, bone dry, dropped into the hot fat for 15-20 seconds until crisp and still green. Wet parsley will spit violently, so pat it thoroughly and stand back. Lift it out before it darkens past bright green or it turns bitter.
- ServingSalt the fish as it comes out of the pan, pile the parsley alongside, and give each plate a lemon wedge. Nothing here holds; serve straight from the pan.
Frying whole small trout in flour is among the plainest treatments in the Italian repertoire and one that assumes the freshest fish: no marinade, no sauce, nothing to cover a stale flavour. Trout of this kind came out of cold streams and lakes in many parts of Italy, the northern valleys among them. The fried parsley garnish is worth noting in its own right: deep-fried herbs and greens turn up as an accompaniment to fritti in Italian cookery, a use that has largely dropped out of home kitchens outside Italy. The alternative "in oil or in butter" is consistent with the broad regional split between olive oil in the south and centre and butter in the north, though the recipe itself says nothing about region.