Forelle Müllerin

The first time I ate Forelle Müllerin properly was not in a restaurant. It was at a Gasthaus terrace on the Wolfgangsee during one of our summer trips, the ones Gretel and my grandmother Eva took me on every year through Austria. I was maybe nine or ten. The fish arrived whole on an oval plate, golden brown and glistening with brown butter, a scatter of parsley across the top and lemon wedges tucked alongside. Gretel told me to squeeze the lemon over the skin, not the flesh, so the acid hit the crispy flour crust first. I've done it that way ever since.

Forelle Müllerin means trout in the style of the miller's wife. The name tells you the whole technique: you dredge the fish in flour, the way a miller's wife would have used what was closest to hand, and you fry it in butter until the coating turns golden and the skin beneath it goes crisp. Then you make Nussbutter in the same pan. Nussbutter is what Austrians call brown butter, butter cooked past golden until the milk solids turn the color of hazelnuts and the whole kitchen smells warm and nutty. You spoon it over the fish at the table. That's the dish.

The technique is simple but it demands your attention for about ten minutes. The trout needs a hot pan and enough butter to do the job. The flour coating needs to be thin and even, shaken free of any excess, or it will turn pasty instead of crisp. And the Nussbutter needs watching because the distance between brown butter and burnt butter is about twenty seconds of distraction. This is good Austrian home cooking at its most honest: one beautiful ingredient, treated with respect, and finished with butter.