Let’s eat some fish today (or talk about it anyway) because it’s Friday during Lent.
“Fisch Müllerin” is a specific way to prepare medium sized fish like Forelle (trout) or Scholle (plaice). Müllerin is a female miller. In English, “Forelle Müllerin” is called “trout meunière” which obviously isn’t English but French; meunière also means ‘female miller’, like the German.
There are variations to the name like “Müllerinart”, “Müllerin Art” or “nach Art der Müllerin” which all mean á la miller or the way the miller does it.
Photo: Forelle Müllerin. Von Catatine - Eigenes Werk, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=143904569
But what does a miller have to do with fish?
It’s the flour; millers and/or millers’ wives had access to fresh flour. Once the fish is gutted and scaled, it is dunked in salted milk and then dredged in flour. I can only speculate that the female version of miller is used because women often do or did the majority of the cooking.
The fish is then fried in butter until golden brown with a nice crispy crust. You can use the left-over juice and mix it with parsley, lemon juice and more butter. You can also find it with an almond-butter sauce and some sliced almonds.
This way of cooking and eating fish has been around a long time. It is said that the French king Louis XIV (1638-1715) enjoyed fish “á la meunière”.