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To Fry Smelts
Clean nicely, handle as little as possible; dip in milk, then in cracker dust, then in beaten egg, then in dust again; continue this until well coated; fry some salt pork in lard, remove the slices of pork, and put in the smelts and fry a light brown. Serve upon a napkin, and garnish with fried parsley.
A straightforward breaded fry; the only real complications are the vanished vessels and the pork-flavoured fat.
- Cracker dustPlain unsalted soda crackers or water biscuits crushed to a coarse powder — not modern seasoned breadcrumbs, which brown faster and taste of herbs. Pulse in a food processor or roll in a bag until sandy with a few larger flecks.
- The coating orderMilk, then crumb, then egg, then crumb again is a deliberate double breading and it holds up better than a single pass. Rest the coated fish on a rack for ten minutes before frying so the crust sets; "continue this until well coated" most likely means a second round rather than many, though the recipe leaves the number open.
- Handle as little as possibleThe instruction that matters. Smelts are soft-fleshed and the skin tears easily; once dressed, move them by the tail and lay them in the pan rather than turning them repeatedly.
- Cleaning themSmall smelts are usually gutted through a slit behind the gills and cooked head-on and whole, bones included — the spine is fine enough to eat. Larger ones can be headed and the backbone slipped out.
- Frying in pork fatThe pork slices are there to flavour the lard, not to be served. Render them slowly until they give up their fat and go pale gold, then lift them out. Neutral oil with a spoonful of bacon fat gets close; keep the fat at 350–360°F, about half an inch deep.
- TimingTwo to three minutes total for fish of five or six inches, turning once. They are done when the crust is light brown; past that the flesh dries and the delicate cucumber note goes.
- Fried parsleyFlat-leaf sprigs, thoroughly dry, dropped into the same fat for about fifteen seconds until they stop sputtering and turn bright and brittle. Wet parsley will spit violently.
- ServingThe napkin is a linen cloth folded on the platter to absorb fat — a paper-lined dish or a wire rack does the same job. Serve with lemon.
Smelts are small, silvery, oily-fleshed fish of the Osmerus and related genera, netted in large numbers in New England rivers during their spring spawning runs and cheap enough in the late nineteenth century to be a common market fish. Their popularity rested in part on the fact that they could be eaten whole, bones and all, which suited the breaded frying common in the fish chapters of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks. Frying pork first to season the fat is an older economy carried into an era of commercial lard — the same trick that flavours chowders and pan-fried fish in the same books. The linen napkin and the wreath of fried parsley were a standard genteel presentation of the period, and appear almost interchangeably behind fried whitebait, oysters and croquettes.