Home › Fish, Eggs, and Sauces › English Recipe for Frying Fish
English Recipe for Frying Fish
Wash the fish, dry it well, dust it thickly with flour. Beat an egg light, dip the fish carefully, then dip it in bread-crumbs. Fry in a deep pan, in butter, olive oil, or suet, very hot.
A bare-bones breading method rather than a full recipe: the original assumes you know your fish, your fat and your pan. The points below fill in what it leaves out.
- Dry the fish properlyThis is the hinge. Flour will not adhere to a wet fillet, and surface water drops the temperature of the fat and makes the crust slide off in sheets. Blot both sides on paper or a clean cloth until the surface looks matte.
- The three-stage coatingFlour, then beaten egg, then crumbs, in that order and with no gaps. Season the flour rather than the fish itself; salt drawn out onto a wet surface will loosen the crust.
- Bread-crumbs, period senseIn older usage these were generally dried crumbs from stale bread, rubbed through a sieve, rather than the fresh soft crumbs a modern cook might reach for. Fine dried crumbs or panko both work; fresh crumbs can scorch before the fish is done.
- "Very hot" fatRoughly 350-375F. A crumb dropped in should sizzle at once and brown in under a minute. Below that the coating absorbs fat; much above it, the crumbs burn before the interior sets.
- Butter is the weak choiceWhole butter smokes and blackens well below frying temperature. Clarified butter, olive oil or a neutral oil all hold up; suet, the third option given, was a common kitchen fat in British households of the period and behaves much like lard.
- Depth of pan"A deep pan" here means enough fat to come at least halfway up the fish, so it fries rather than pan-browns. An inch to an inch and a half in a heavy pan is ample for fillets.
- TimingNone is given because it depends entirely on thickness. Fillets of half an inch take about two to three minutes a side; the fish is done when the flesh turns opaque and flakes, around 145F at the centre.
- DrainingOnto a rack rather than paper if you want the underside to stay crisp. Salt the moment it comes out of the fat, while the surface will still take it.
Fried fish in an egg-and-crumb jacket is the English side of a dish that arrived with Sephardic Jewish settlers in London, who fried fish in batter or crumbs to be eaten cold on the Sabbath; by the mid-nineteenth century fried fish sold from London stalls was cheap street food, and its pairing with fried potatoes into what became fish and chips is generally traced to the 1860s. Here the point is less precision than the flavour of the country: an English recipe is offered as a method, on the assumption that the cook already knows how to handle a fish and judge hot fat. The vagueness about fat is itself telling, listing butter, olive oil and suet as equal options.