Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Broiled Smelts
Broiled Smelts
Select 12 large smelts, clean well and split. Chop 12 olives, 1/2 green pepper with seeds removed, 2 sprigs parsley, add 1/2 tablespoon Crisco. Spread paste inside each smelt. Close fish together, sprinkle with salt, moisten with melted Crisco and broil over clear fire.
A quick broiled fish from one of Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional cookbooks, where the shortening turns up in places butter or oil would ordinarily go. The whole thing takes under ten minutes once the fish are split.
- Do not overcookSmelts are small and lean and go dry fast. Split and laid flat, they need roughly 3 to 4 minutes total under a hot broiler, about 4 inches from the element, and generally do not need turning. The flesh should just turn opaque at the thickest point behind the head.
- "Broil over clear fire"A clear fire is coals that have burned down past flame and smoke to steady red heat, so the fish takes on no soot. An overhead broiler preheated on high, or a grill over settled coals, gives the same result.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, launched in 1911 and reformulated by 2007 to cut trans fats to under half a gram per serving. Nothing here depends on it: melted butter or a neutral oil does the same work in the filling and for the surface brushing, and butter browns better under the broiler.
- Splitting the fishClean and gut, then open along the belly so the fish lies flat, butterflied. The backbone can be pulled out from the head end or left in; smelt bones are fine enough to eat. The recipe does not say what counts as "large" -- use the biggest smelts you can get.
- The stuffing quantityHalf a tablespoon of fat across twelve fish is a binder, not a sauce. The chopped olives, half a green bell pepper and parsley make something on the order of half a cup of paste, roughly a tablespoon per fish. Chop everything fine or it will fall out on the grill.
- SaltOlives bring their own salt. Taste the paste before salting the fish, and use a light hand on the outside.
- YieldTwelve smelts serve three to four as a main course with potatoes, or six as a first course. Serve immediately with lemon; they cool and stiffen quickly.
Smelts were once cheap, abundant and seasonal along the North Atlantic coast and in the Great Lakes, sold by the pound in early spring when the fish ran up rivers to spawn, and they show up constantly in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — fried whole, broiled, or served in tidy fans as a first course. Their reputation rested partly on smell: the origin of the name is obscure, though cooks often connected it to the cucumber-like scent of a truly fresh fish. This particular version comes from a Crisco-sponsored menu book, one of a genre Procter & Gamble published to persuade American cooks that a shelf-stable hydrogenated shortening belonged everywhere lard and butter had been, including brushed on broiled fish. The olive-and-green-pepper stuffing is very much of its moment.