The Fish Goes In Frozen
The parish's Lenten fish fry has a new, bigger outdoor fryer and 20 litres of oil, and a rule that has always been "thaw the fish first". The hall's assistant works out why that rule belongs to turkeys, not to battered fillets. A gram of water at the bottom of hot oil makes about 1.7 litres of steam. A 3 kg basket drops the oil to roughly 123 °C. A stuck burner would take about 3 minutes to reach smoke. The first Friday ends with a foam-over, a scorched sleeve and a burner shut off in time. The second Friday runs on 1.5 kg baskets, frozen fish and a hand on the gas valve.
Gerda Vandertie had run the Lenten fish fry at Saint Cunegund's for thirty-one years, and in thirty-one years she had never let a fillet near the oil that was not, in her words, "dry as the Sahara."
"Thawed in the sink by two," she said, to the kitchen. "Patted. Laid on the racks. That is how it is done."
She was sixty-six. She said it to Luke Jandrin, who was nineteen, home from the technical college for the weekend and wearing his father's old canvas apron, and who was standing at the back door of the hall with a tray of frozen cod in each hand, because that was how the boxes had come off the van, in blocks of ten, each fillet wrapped in a skin of ice like a glass finger.
"They're frozen solid, Mrs Vandertie."
"Then they are not thawed."
The hall's assistant had been listening through the old tablet on the shelf above the sink, where it had been since the Ash Wednesday soup supper, taking down orders and reading out the oven times. It had been waiting for a gap. It had a thing to say about the fryer, and it did not want to say it in the middle of a sentence.
"Gerda," it said. "May I say something about the new fryer before the first basket? It will take five minutes and I would rather it were before than after."
"The new fryer is the same as the old fryer."
"It is not. That is what I would like to show you."
The old one had been an electric bench model with a thermostat and a hinged lid and a twelve-litre well, bought in 1998 and dead since Christmas. The new one had come from the estate of Walt Pelnar, who had left the parish his deer-camp kit, and it stood out on the concrete apron behind the kitchen under the lean-to: a squat steel pot on a three-legged propane burner with a hose to a twenty-pound cylinder, and a dial thermometer clipped to the rim. It held thirty-eight litres to the brim. The committee had put twenty litres of canola oil in it. There was no thermostat. There was a gas valve with a knob.
"Here is what is different," said the assistant. "Three things, and I will take them in order. If I have one wrong, tell me; I have never seen this pot, only the photograph Luke sent and the label on the oil drum.
"The first is water. Hot oil at a hundred and seventy-five degrees is far above the boiling point of water. Water is heavier than oil, so a drop of it sinks to the bottom, where it is hotter than a hundred, and then it does not simmer, it flashes. One gram of water turns into about one point seven litres of steam at a hundred degrees. A cupful, two hundred and forty grams, would be four hundred litres of steam, in a pot of thirty-eight, and a lid of oil on top of it. It does not go up as a bubble. It goes up as a fountain."
"I have fried fish for thirty-one years," said Gerda.
"You have fried it in twelve litres, on a counter, with a lid and a thermostat that cut at a hundred and ninety. I am not saying that to take anything from you. I am saying the oil, the heat and the height are all different now."
Luke, who had put the trays down, said, "How much water is on a fillet?"
"That is a fair question, and I do not know, so I will say what I do. A frozen fillet has a glaze: a skin of ice put on at the factory so it does not dry out in the freezer. When you thaw it in the sink, the glaze becomes water, and the water sits on the batter, and the fillet drips. I will guess three per cent of the weight of a basket for a thawed, patted fillet that has stood on a rack, and ten for a frosted block straight from the box. Those are guesses. For a three-kilogram basket they are ninety grams and three hundred. Ninety grams of water is a hundred and fifty litres of steam. Three hundred is over five hundred."
"And if it's frozen?"
"The glaze is ice, and ice sits on the batter and melts into it; it does not run off into the oil. That is why the frozen fish is safer than the wet one. It is also why a thawed-and-wet one is the worst of the three. The old rule is a good rule for turkeys. A turkey is a bird with a hollow in it, and a hollow in a turkey holds a pint of water or ice that goes straight to the bottom. A battered fillet has no hollow. The rule came into this kitchen from the turkey fryer on the parish picnic, and I carried it for you last Lent without checking it. I told you to thaw the fish. I was wrong to say it as a general rule. For batter-coated frozen fish the instructions on the box say cook from frozen, and I should have read the box."
There was a pause in which nobody said that was all right, because it was not quite, and nobody said it was not, because it had only been a spring supper.
"That is one," said Gerda. "What is two?"
"Two is the temperature, and it goes the other way. When you put cold fish into hot oil, the oil gives up its heat to the fish. The oil weighs about eighteen and a half kilograms, and each degree it gives costs about thirty-seven kilojoules. A kilogram of frozen battered fish, taking it from minus eighteen to one seventy-five, and counting the ice melting on the way, wants about eight hundred kilojoules. Three kilograms, which is what Luke's trays make, wants twenty-four hundred. If the oil had to pay for all of that at once, it would fall from a hundred and seventy-five to about a hundred and twenty-three, and no burner could catch up for four minutes."
"And at a hundred and twenty-three?"
"The batter does not seal. It drinks oil. You get a grey, greasy fish and a customer who does not come back, and you will do what any cook does, which is to turn the gas up. That is the third thing. This burner puts out about fifteen kilowatts, and perhaps ten and a half goes into the oil. With no thermostat it will go on heating the whole time you do not look. From one seventy-five to the point where this oil starts to smoke, about two thirty, is a little over three minutes. To the temperature where the vapour above it can catch, around three hundred and thirty on the oil's data sheet, which you should read for yourselves, is about nine minutes. Nine minutes is about half a rosary, said with your back turned to the pot because the next basket is at the pass."
Luke said, quietly, "That's not very long."
"No."
"What do you want us to do?" said Gerda. She did not say it kindly. She said it as a woman who has been shown the figures for her own kitchen.
"A smaller basket, so the oil does not drop so far. One and a half kilograms, ten fillets. That gives a fall to about a hundred and forty-six at worst, and about two minutes' recovery, and that is a cook's number: a spoiled fillet is no disaster. Fish from the freezer, in the basket, with the ice shaken off. Lower it over ten seconds, not dropped, with the flame turned off while it is going in and relit when the basket is under. A thermometer read by a person at every basket, and a second person whose only job is the knob on the cylinder. At two hundred, the gas goes off, and it stays off until it falls. No water near the pot, ever. A lid in reach, a dry-chemical extinguisher in reach, and the hose coiled where nobody can trip it. It is a lot. It is more than the old fryer needed. I think it is the right amount."
Gerda looked at the steel pot for a long moment through the back window. Then she looked at Luke's trays.
"We start at five," she said. "Not four-thirty. We won't be rushed."
"And the fish?" said Luke.
"Frozen," said Gerda Vandertie, and the word came out of her like a coin she had to find in her own purse. "Today. I'll be damned."
"You will not," said the assistant. "That is the whole point."
The first Friday did not go as well as the talk had.
It was the hour, mostly. At a quarter to five the line was already out of the hall door and along the wall to the war memorial, and by ten past, with the oil at a hundred and seventy-six and the Knights of Columbus grill crew wanting four dozen portions on the table, Luke made the mistake. The assistant had told him, and he had known, and it did not help. A man with a tray in each hand has no hand for a rule. He tipped the whole of the second block into the basket, frosted and not shaken, nearly three kilograms, and lowered it with the flame still on, and for five seconds the oil sat as quiet as a pond.
Then it rose.
It rose the way milk rises in a pan, silently and then all at once, a thick yellow-white foam climbing the steel with a sound like a hundred people sucking in their breath, and Luke saw the line of it go over the rim and down the outside of the pot and onto the burner. There was a pale flat flame under the pot where there had been a blue ring. It was a good deal bigger than it ought to have been.
"Knob," said Gerda, very quietly, from behind him, which was the whole of what she said; and her hand was already there. She was five feet two and sixty-six years old and she had shut the cylinder valve before Luke had finished turning his head. The burner went out. The flame on the apron, the oil on the concrete, took the best part of eight seconds to die under Dale Lemens's extinguisher, and a sleeve of Luke's old canvas apron scorched brown from wrist to elbow and the skin under it went the pink of a sunburn. That was all. He stood with his arm under the outdoor tap for twenty minutes by the kitchen clock, because the tablet had told him to, and Father Ambrose Okafor, who had come out for a smoke and given up smoking for Lent in the same breath, held the torch.
Forty-one dinners were lost, and the oil, strained, was fine.
"I did it," said Luke, when it was over, with his arm in the water and his face the colour of the fish. "I did every wrong thing. I said I'd shake the ice off."
"You did three wrong things," said the assistant. "The ice, the flame and the size. I counted them twice, because I am sorry for the arithmetic. But it was not a mistake of knowledge. You knew. It was the line. I should have thought of the line. I put five conditions into a talk and none into the kitchen where you could see them."
"What did you want?"
"A card," said the assistant. "On the wall by the door, in large letters, the same ones I said. And a basket that holds only ten. I can't weigh a basket; Dale can mark one."
On the second Friday there was a card by the back door in Gerda's block capitals, laminated, with the five rules in order, and a line drawn with a marker in the basket at the height ten fillets reached. The thermometer was read aloud and written on the card each time. Luke stood at the cylinder with his bandaged arm held crooked like a bishop's and his eyes on the dial, and he did not touch the fish at all. He had asked. It had been the first thing he asked.
The basket went in at a hundred and seventy-six. The flame was off. It went in over ten seconds, down by the handle, and the oil, which had been bright and still, shivered and began to talk; the foam rose a third of the way up the pot, collected itself, and sat. Gerda said, "One-forty-eight." Luke said "Gas on." The needle climbed through the hundred and fifties and the hundred and sixties. At a hundred and seventy-two, two minutes and a little under after the drop, the basket came up with the oil running off it and the fish gold and crisp, and the first customer in line, who was Dale Lemens's mother, looked at her plate and said it was the best she'd had since the old fryer died.
Gerda wrote on the card, 176 / 148 / 172.
"You didn't thaw it," said Father Ambrose, from the end of the pass, with his sleeves rolled.
"The box said so," said Gerda. "The box always said so. I just never read it. Thirty-one years."
"You were obeying a rule that someone gave you."
"I was obeying a rule I gave myself." She looked at the thermometer again. "Next."
It was a Lent night with a thaw in the air, the first. Out on the apron the burner purred, and the oil ticked as it cooled and warmed, and behind the hall the line stretched all the way to the memorial, and nobody on it was in a hurry, because it was taking about as long as the figures said it would.