The sign says Millie Peartree Fish Fry & Soul Food, which is both a name and a promise. A fish fry is an event, whether held on a riverbank down South on a Saturday afternoon or in a church basement after Sunday worship, or any day of the week at this small storefront with just two stools, next to a funeral home in Fordham Manor, in the Bronx.
There might be a short wait, because everything is fried to order: supple fillets of whiting, ready to flake, and firmer catfish, along with generous bulges of shrimp. All are buried in cornmeal and plunged in seething oil, to emerge with a shrug of gold.
The cooking sounds straightforward, and Millie Peartree, the Bronx-born chef and owner, insists that it is. “Make sure the fish is fresh,” she said — she gets hers delivered daily from a purveyor in Hunts Point — “so the batter will cling. Oil at the right temperature. It’s not rocket science.”
So of all the fish-fry joints in the city, why walk into this one? For the improbable lightness of those golden coats, with just enough salt and crunch before they give way to delicate flesh. Each variety of seafood (along with chicken wingettes, the lone representative of turf) is seasoned to fit its character, with more (and secret) spices going into the cornmeal, uniting them in verve.
The menu is a series of mix-and-match configurations, including knobs of cornbread, brushed with honey butter; crusty-edged fries dusted in Old Bay; candied yams that stop just short of actual candy; and collards tender but still resilient after a long boil with smoked turkey, the meat then pulled and strewn among the greens.
Mac and cheese is listed among the sides, but that’s a technicality; it could easily command the meal. Ms. Peartree makes hers using the custard method — “not the fancy French way with béchamel,” she said — stirring milk and eggs with Cheddars sharp and mild and Monterey Jack, then parking it in the oven.
When it comes out, more cheese is tumbled over the top, to melt en route to the counter. It’s rich but not so heavy that your life flashes before your eyes, and creamy without losing coherence. The cheese stretches. Call it glory.
The Bronx-born chef Millie Peartree knows her customers. “You share stories,” she said.CreditJenny Huang for The New York Times
Whiting and catfish also come stacked in a sandwich, although by sandwich what’s meant is a slice of bread slapped above and below, with no intervening lettuce or tomato and unslaked by sauce, the applying of which is your business.
Among the adornments on hand: house-made tartar, straight or spiked with sriracha, and chipotle aioli with its furl of smoke. The hot sauce is Trappey’s Red Devil, whose roots go back to Louisiana in 1898. (Crystal loyalists might want to bring their own.)
For many who make a pilgrimage to Millie Peartree — some from as far as Staten Island, Poughkeepsie and New Jersey — there’s hardly a distinction between dish and memory. “You share stories,” Ms. Peartree said. One customer told her, “My grandmother makes potato salad the way you make potato salad.”
“It’s a tribute to the way my mother” — Millie Bell, of Savannah, Ga. — “taught me to do it,” Ms. Peartree said. She cracked her first egg at age 6, at her mother’s side. There was always a slab of cornbread cooling on the sill. Later, when Ms. Bell was dying of cancer, though she had hardly an appetite, she still asked her daughter to cook for her.
After her mother died, Ms. Peartree took over raising her four younger brothers and sisters, two of whom had been diagnosed as autistic. While working in advertising sales at Viacom, she brought in cupcakes for a holiday bake-off and won. Upper management took notice, and she started catering for corporate galas and celebrity birthdays.
She opened Millie Peartree Fish Fry two years ago and will soon shift to a larger space next door, where she’ll have 16 seats and steamed crab legs and lobster tails. She still bakes, crowding the counter with rounds of red velvet and airy sweet potato pie.
Once she dreamed of going to culinary school, but her mother didn’t think she needed it, and maybe her mother was right. Ms. Peartree can hear her still: “I’m not going to pay for something you already know how to do!”
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