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SMELTS, BAKED (au Gratin)
Take a dozen smelts, clean and dry them, and trim away the fins. Butter a pie-dish thickly, and sprinkle on the bottom finely-grated breadcrumbs seasoned with pepper and salt, finely-chopped parsley, and shallot. Put the smelts in the dish in a row, sprinkle seasoned breadcrumbs on the top, and pour upon the fish a glassful of sherry, a dessert-spoonful of lemonjuice, and half a tea-spoonful of essence of anchovy. Place little pieces of butter here and there on the fish, and bake them in a moderate oven. When done enough, serve the smelts quite hot in the dish in which they were baked. Time, a quarter of an hour to bake the smelts. Probable cost, 1s. to 2s. per dozen. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward gratin of whole small fish, and one of the few Victorian fish dishes whose timing needs almost no adjustment. The points below cover the vessels, the vanished bottled flavourings, and what to buy if smelts are not at your fishmonger.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F (175C). Smelts are thin enough that a hotter oven, 400F, works too and browns the crumb better, but then check at eight minutes.
- A glassful of sherry"Glassful" is generally taken to mean a wine glass, roughly 2 fl oz (60 ml), rather than a modern stemmed glass; the book itself does not define it. Use a dry sherry such as fino or amontillado; the cream sherries sold today will make the dish sweet.
- Essence of anchovyA bottled Victorian staple, thin and salty. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste from a tube, or one mashed salted anchovy fillet, is the closest equivalent. Season the crumbs lightly to allow for it.
- Shallot quantityThe original gives none. One small shallot, chopped very fine, is enough for a dozen fish; raw shallot in a fifteen-minute bake stays sharp, so keep the pieces small.
- Cleaning the fishSmelts are traditionally cooked whole, head and tail on, and are often sold already gutted. Larger ones benefit from having the gut removed; very small ones are eaten entire, bones included.
- If you cannot find smeltsSubstitute another small whole fish of similar size, four to six inches: fresh sardines, or small whiting fillets laid in a single layer. Adjust time to size, not to the clock.
- Fifteen minutes is right, but only justA quarter of an hour suits fish of that size in a moderate oven. They are done when the flesh at the backbone is opaque and lifts from the bone; past that they dry out and the crumbs are the only thing left worth eating.
- Dish and serving"Pie-dish" means an ovenproof earthenware baking dish, and the fish should sit in one close row rather than overlapping. A dozen smelts stretched across five or six people is a Victorian first course; count on it serving three or four as a modern light main with bread.
Smelts, the small silvery fish of the genus Osmerus, were a cheap and abundant catch in British estuaries through the nineteenth century, sold by the dozen and often noted for a faint cucumber smell when very fresh; in Scotland and the north they were known as "sparling". Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, gives smelts several treatments, among them fried in breadcrumbs and this au gratin version, which borrows a French method — a buttered dish, seasoned crumbs above and below, browned in the oven — and anglicises it with sherry and essence of anchovy. That bottled anchovy essence is a period marker: it recurs constantly in Victorian fish and sauce recipes, a legacy of the eighteenth-century taste for anchovy-based ketchups and store sauces that gave depth without the labour of a stock. The costing, one to two shillings a dozen, records a fish that was still everyday food; stocks in many rivers later declined sharply, and smelts are now a specialist purchase rather than a market commonplace.