The BEST Fried Catfish You'll Ever Make (The Southern Way)

📖 Get all 305 of Grandma's secrets here: https://earlenetatum.com There are two pieces of catfish in a black skillet right now and the skillet is not mine. It is my grandmother's, and it is sitting on her wood stove, in the house she left us eleven miles north of town on a gravel road. I drove out this morning because on a Friday there is only one thing that belongs in that skillet. Most of you drop the fish in and the cornmeal comes up off it in the grease. Half the crust floats and the other half slides off on the plate, and everybody at the table reaches for the hot sauce to get it down. I have fried fish in this skillet since I was nine years old and I have never once had the crust stay behind in the grease. Two fillets, cornmeal, a spoon of grease out of the can by the stove, twenty minutes in buttermilk and ten minutes on a paper sack. And one thing Callie Mae put in that cornmeal that no sack of cornmeal ever printed on the back. She never let me do that part. It is saved for the end. Two small fillets and a plate of meal: Friday supper for two with white bread and hot sauce. Here is the afternoon, in order: 0:00 Two pieces of catfish in her skillet 2:42 What this fish is, and why the crust falls off (it is the water) 4:28 What a crust needs: dry fish, a coat that holds, grease that is ready 6:07 The buying and the buttermilk: color, smell, twenty minutes, never pat it dry 7:57 Friday at Callie Mae's: the fish truck, Thursday's paper, a milk crate 10:04 The cornmeal: salt goes IN the meal, and the split where the bone came out 12:00 The paper sack: ten minutes, not two and not thirty 13:51 The grease: how deep, and a pinch of meal to ask it 15:56 One turn, the sound, and the knock test 18:01 The three ways I have ruined this fish 19:55 The thing I kept back: what she put in the cornmeal 21:58 Hush puppies from the leftover meal, and the Friday plate 23:02 The whole thing in one breath There is a new recipe here every single day. Come back and cook with me. Next time I am baking a sweet potato pie. Not the kind with the can and the carton. Hers had a top that cracked and a middle that stood up on the fork, and it was one thing she did to the potato before it saw the pie plate.