Being a southern boy, getting away from the cornmeal coating is difficult, however... since being instructed in the art of how to cook fish with a little oil and a little butter with various seasonings many years ago by a QP Sage... old_salt himself I have refined the technique to my own personal taste.  
Since to me there is nothing quite like the taste of fresh caught walleye and or northern, (and yes I love them both)  I usually will not eat smallies since I like to catch them so much!!  What I do now is bring a bottle of Squeeze margarine, and a small bottle of either peanut oil or canola oil, put just enough of both about an ounce to coat the bottom of the pan and cook the fillets turning once until they are done.  Then I spinkle a little fresh ground sea salt on them and enjoy the rich flavor...

To carry my oil and butter to prevent spillage in the food barrel, I put the bottles in a good quality plastic bag with a good zipper seal and I have never had any spills or leaks.

Bruce

We have been using grape seed oil for the past few years. Bread the fish and pan fry. The oil has a pretty high smoke point and tastes pretty good.

Butter flavored crisco every time.

pghportager wrote on Jun 17^th, 2009 at 1:38pm:


 IF anyone tries pghportager's Laker recipe, be sure too add the LIME JUICE if nothing else  Lemon Juice would work also. The acid in the Lime Juice cooks the fish, a technique popular down Mexico way.
 My first trip into the BW with a group, some of the guys ate some Small Mouth that they didn't cook properly. Next morning when they visited the privy, they had a wriggling surprise in their scat
 I wasn't bothered, but I like my fish WELL DONE. They were so freaked out, they ate freeze dried the rest of the trip. Turned out too be relatively harmless parasites.  For the Sushi eaters out there, I saw a show where a internist(?) in CA said that he wouldn't eat Sushi because of all the patients he saw with worms from eating raw fish, from supposedly reputable restaurants. I guess you need too eat it with Wasabi too make sure any parasites are well done

My understanding is ceviche is only safe (relatively speaking) with saltwater fish, freshwater fish have more parasites.
Regarding ghee, although I haven't used it I have been told another benefit is that it doesn't spoil like butter does.
I prefer grilling (over cedar) and I am definitely going to try the less oil approach you guys are talking about.  We have used Wesson corn oil and Shorelunch "classic" breading which tastes great  but that has something to do with the MSG in it, no doubt.  This trip we had more fried fish than we could eat (a large pike had to be killed--inhaled a big lure and got it tangles up in it's gills.  We had some Mountain House fish chowder--basically the classic milk/potato base with shrimp and clams, and we added the leftover fried fish--dang it was good!