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Pan Fish in Deep Fat
This is a very good way to cook smelts, trout and other small fish. Clean as usual, removing the fins and tails. The heads may be left on. Dust with salt and pepper, roll in crumbs and fry in deep Mazola. Serve with cress or parsley, lemon, and Shoe String Potatoes. 1¼ cups Mazola Mayonnaise 1 tablespoon thinly sliced
A brand-cookbook recipe for corn oil, written for cooks who already knew how to run a kettle of deep fat. The text runs off into a fragment of an unrelated mayonnaise recipe at the end; ignore it.
- MazolaMazola is corn oil, still sold under that name. Any neutral oil with a smoke point above 400F will serve here. Books like this were meant to persuade cooks to use the oil in place of lard and butter, frying among other uses.
- Fat temperatureThe original gives none. Small whole fish want 375F: hot enough to set the crumb coat before the flesh overcooks, cool enough that the crumbs do not blacken. Smelts take about two to three minutes, trout of six inches nearer four.
- Make the crumbs stick"Roll in crumbs" alone will not hold well on wet fish. A dusting of flour, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water or milk, then fine dry crumbs is the usual fuller method, though the recipe as printed calls for none of it. Letting the breaded fish rest ten minutes before frying helps the coating set.
- Heads onLeft on, heads are traditional for smelts and give something to hold. Gills should still come out, as they are bitter and hold blood. Smelts under about five inches are eaten bones and all; larger trout are not.
- CressThe recipe says only "cress"; watercress, sold in bunches and peppery, is the likeliest reading, though garden cress was also sold under the name. Curly parsley was the other standard garnish.
- Shoe String PotatoesPotatoes cut in matchsticks and fried, evidently a recipe given elsewhere in the book. If you use the same fat, fry them first at a lower heat, drain, then crisp them after the fish while the oil is still hot.
- YieldFigure three or four smelts per person as a course, or one small trout. A quart of oil in a deep saucepan is enough for two or three batches; do not crowd the pan or the temperature drops and the coating soaks.
This comes from a promotional cookbook issued by the makers of Mazola, the corn oil that Corn Products Refining Company introduced in the early twentieth century. Books of this kind were given away or sold cheaply to persuade American cooks that a bottled vegetable oil could do the work of lard, drippings and butter, and deep-frying recipes were the argument's strongest ground: a neutral oil with a high smoke point genuinely did fry cleaner than animal fat, and could be strained and reused. Pan fish here means small freshwater or inshore fish cooked whole in the pan rather than filleted, and smelts in particular were cheap and abundant along the Atlantic coast, sold by the pound in spring runs. The pairing with shoestring potatoes and a lemon shows how firmly the fried-fish-and-potatoes plate had settled into American dinner service.