The Fish Fry

The fish fry is a communal meal of fish dredged in seasoned cornmeal and fried in hot fat, and in the American South it belongs above all to Black communities, where it has served at once as a family supper, a church fundraiser and a neighbourhood gathering. Adrian Miller, in Soul Food, places fried fish within the foodways that enslaved Africans and their descendants built in the South, where rivers, creeks and coast supplied a free or cheap protein and where cornmeal was the staple of the pantry.

The essay begins with the fish itself. Catfish, among them the channel catfish Ictalurus punctatus, is the fish most closely tied to the Southern fry, alongside whiting, porgy, buffalo fish and other local species, and the choice depends on the water nearest at hand. The fish is seasoned with salt and black pepper, often with cayenne or a little garlic powder, then coated in cornmeal, sometimes with a proportion of flour, and fried until the crust is deep gold and crisp while the flesh stays moist and just opaque. Where the dish lives or dies is in the fat and its heat: oil that is too cool leaves the coating greasy and heavy, and oil that is too hot browns the crust before the centre is cooked. A frying temperature of about 175°C (350°F) to 190°C (375°F) is the working range, and the fish is fried in small batches so that the oil does not fall in temperature. The accompaniments are as fixed as the fish. The fried fish plate is an assembly of dishes with their own histories: white bread or hushpuppies made from cornmeal batter, coleslaw, french fries or grits, and hot sauce or vinegar-based pepper sauce at the table. The cornmeal links the fish to the corn cookery of Native nations, whose maize the South adopted and which Black cooks carried into the frying pan. Hushpuppies are fried in the fat left from the fish, which spares the cook a second pot of oil. The setting matters as much as the recipe. The fish fry is a public meal, cooked outdoors or in a church hall, in large pots over propane burners or in a kitchen turned into a production line, and sold by the plate. It is a meal for raising money, for a Friday evening, for a family reunion or for a homecoming, and in many Black churches it has paid for roofs, buses and scholarships. The cooks are often men who fry out of doors, a division of labour that departs from the usual pattern of the Sunday dinner, which is the work of women in the kitchen. Its spread beyond the South follows the movement of Black families to northern and western cities during the twentieth century. In places such as Chicago, Detroit and Milwaukee the fish fry took on new forms, and in the upper Midwest a Friday fish fry became a regional institution of its own, with a separate Catholic and tavern tradition behind it. The Southern Black fish fry nonetheless remains the root of the form that Miller describes, a meal in which a modest fish, a plain coating and a hot pot bring a community to one table.

The taste of the dish is the contrast between a salted, peppery cornmeal crust, brittle and slightly sweet from the corn, and the soft, clean flesh within. Hot sauce or a sharp vinegar pepper sauce cuts the richness of the fat, and the coleslaw adds cold acidity and crunch beside the hot fish. Sweet tea or lemonade is the usual drink, and the plate is eaten at once, while the crust is still crisp.