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Sauce (Clean fish season with salt)
Clean fish, season with salt and pepper. Dip in crumbs, brush over with beaten egg, and crumb again. Fry in deep Crisco and drain on brown paper.
Sauce. Blend 1½ tablespoonfuls Crisco with 1 tablespoonful flour in saucepan over fire, add 1 cupful of milk or cream and bring to boil, cook for a few minutes over hot water. Cool and add 2 chopped green bell peppers and 6 medium-sized chopped sour pickles.
A plain breaded fried fish with a cold pickle-and-pepper cream sauce, written to sell shortening. The frying is straightforward; the sauce needs a little interpretation.
- On the rouxThe sauce blends 1½ tablespoonfuls Crisco with 1 tablespoonful flour, which is what the printed page gives. That slight excess of fat makes a soft, loose sauce; for a thicker one, raise the flour to match the Crisco.
- Crisco and its substitutesCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a clean-tasting, high-smoke-point alternative to lard. Any neutral frying oil works for the deep fat; butter is better in the sauce if you are not bound to the book's purpose.
- Fry temperatureThe original gives none. Deep fat for breaded fish wants 365–375F. Below that the crumbs soak; above it they colour before the fish is done.
- The breading orderCrumb, egg, crumb is unusual — most modern practice is flour, egg, crumb. Dry the fish thoroughly first or nothing adheres; the initial crumb coat here is standing in for flour.
- "Over hot water"That means a double boiler. After the sauce comes to a boil on direct heat, finishing it over simmering water for a few minutes cooks out the raw flour taste without scorching the milk.
- Drain on brown paperThe period equivalent of draining on paper. A rack set over a tray keeps the crust crisper than any paper; paper towel on a plate steams the underside.
- The sauce is served coolPeppers and pickles go in after cooling, so this is a cold pickle sauce on hot fish — closer to tartar sauce than to a hot cream sauce. Six medium sour pickles to one cup of sauce is assertive; start with three and taste.
- YieldThe original gives no yield, and no quantity of fish is specified.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook from Procter & Gamble, published soon after Crisco itself went on sale — a wholly new product that had to teach cooks what to do with it. Hydrogenated cottonseed oil was pitched as cleaner and more economical than lard or butter, and free of the religious and dietary objections attached to pork fat, a point the company made explicitly to Jewish households. Recipes like this one exist to demonstrate range: the same tin fries the fish and starts the roux for the sauce. The sauce itself is a standard white sauce turned into something like a tartar by the addition of chopped sour pickles and green peppers, a combination found in American fish cookery of the period, when bottled and barreled pickles were a common pantry staple.