Home › The Principles of Cookery › Smelts, Boiled, for Invalids
Smelts, Boiled, for Invalids
Take a couple of large smelts, draw them carefully, and wipe them gently with a soft cloth; put a quarter of a pint of water into a saucepan with a pinch of salt, a small lump of sugar, and about fifty picked parsley-leaves. When the water boils put in the smelts, and let them simmer gently until done enough. Take them up carefully on a slicer, lay them on a dish, and pour the liquor in which they were boiled over them. Be watchful that the fish does not burn to the bottom of the saucepan. If liked, the gravy may be thickened with half a tea-spoonful of arrowroot, to be put with it when the sauce has simmered three minutes. Time to simmer the fish, five minutes, or longer if the smelts are unusually large. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for one person.
A tiny dish of poached fish from the invalid-cookery chapter, built for digestibility rather than flavour. Almost everything that needs translating here is a unit or a piece of vanished kitchen vocabulary.
- The hinge: barely a simmerSmelts are small, thin-fleshed fish and the pan holds very little liquid. Keep the water at a bare tremble; five minutes is the outside limit for average fish, and two to three will do for anything under 15 cm. The flesh should just release from the backbone.
- A quarter of a pintIn an Imperial book that is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. It is a deliberately small amount, and it explains the warning about scorching.
- "Draw" the fishGut them. Smelts are usually gutted through a small slit or by pressing the innards out at the vent, and are commonly cooked with the heads on. Note that the recipe wipes them with a cloth rather than rinsing them.
- Fifty picked parsley-leavesRoughly a small loose handful of parsley leaves, stripped from the stalks, which is what "picked" means here; the point is a light infusion, not a garnish.
- A slicerA fish slice: a wide, thin, slotted spatula. Anything narrower risks breaking the fish.
- Arrowroot thickeningSlake the half teaspoon in a little cold water before it goes in. The original adds it once the sauce has simmered three minutes; arrowroot sets to a clear light gloss and turns thin and slimy if boiled long, so it goes in at the end and comes straight off the heat.
- SourcingEuropean smelt is scarce in shops; American rainbow smelt is sold frozen, cleaned, by the bag, and works. Fresh sprats of similar size are the closest substitute.
- YieldAs stated, one portion: two fish and a few spoonfuls of broth. Sixpence was a genuinely cheap plate of fish.
Cassell's, like nearly every large English cookery book of the period, carries a run of recipes "for invalids": plain boiled, steamed and poached food for the sickroom, when a household nursed its own patients and diet was one of the few treatments a doctor could actually prescribe. The rules of that cookery are visible in every line here — no butter, no browning, a pinch of salt and a lump of sugar for palatability, parsley leaves without their stalks, and the cooking liquor served as its own broth so nothing nourishing is thrown away. Smelts earned their place in it because they are small, lean, soft-fleshed and were cheap and abundant in British estuaries; they were also prized for a faint cucumber smell when very fresh, which is where the family name Osmeridae, from the Greek for odour, comes from. The species has declined sharply in most English rivers since, which is why a fish once sold for sixpence a plate is now an occasional and mostly imported item.