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Smelts, with Anchovies and Capers
Boil a couple of anchovies until dissolved in a gill of white wine, and strain this into the same quantity of rich brown stock. Season with onions and parsley, a blade of mace, a bay-leaf, and pepper and salt. Put eight large smelts into this, and stew gently for a quarter of an hour. Take out the onions, parsley, etc., and add a spoonful of capers. Make it boiling hot, and squeeze in the juice of an orange or lemon. Take out the fish very tenderly and put them on a hot plate. Put a little finely-minced parsley into the sauce, and pour it over the smelts.
A Victorian brown-sauce treatment for a small delicate fish. The one thing to change is the cooking time: everything else translates directly.
- Fifteen minutes is far too longSmelts are finger-sized and cook through in three to four minutes in barely-trembling liquid. A quarter of an hour leaves them collapsed and cottony. Poach until the flesh at the backbone turns opaque, then lift them out and finish reducing the sauce separately.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz in British measure, so a scant two-thirds of a US cup. You need a gill of white wine and a gill of brown stock, which is a small amount of liquid; use a pan just wide enough to hold the fish in one layer.
- AnchoviesThe recipe most likely means salt-cured anchovies, which dissolve into wine over gentle heat in a few minutes. Oil-packed fillets work the same way if you rinse them first.
- Salt lastBetween the anchovies, the capers and a reduced brown stock, the sauce salts itself. Season only after the reduction, with the fish already out of the pan.
- A blade of maceOne of the lacy outer casings of a nutmeg. If you only have ground mace, use a pinch and strain the sauce, since it will not lift out with the onion and parsley as the original expects.
- Brown stockA dark veal or beef stock, not fish stock — the pairing of red-meat gravy with fish is deliberate and characteristic of the period. A good reduced beef stock stands in; avoid anything heavily salted.
- The orangeNineteenth-century recipes calling for orange juice with fish may well mean the sour Seville, in season only briefly in winter. Lemon, which the recipe offers as an alternative, is the easier substitute.
- Sourcing smeltsSold frozen and whole, often already cleaned; heads and tails stay on. Any small whole fish of similar size behaves the same way here. Eight large smelts serve two as a main course or four as a first course.
Smelts were cheap and abundant in Victorian Britain, netted in estuaries in winter and prized for a faint cucumber smell when very fresh. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, first issued in the 1870s and reprinted in expanded form for decades, gives a number of smelt preparations, many of them fried in breadcrumbs; this stewed version belongs to an older tradition of dressing fish in a dark, spiced, anchovy-sharpened gravy, a line that runs back through eighteenth-century English cookery and, arguably, to the medieval habit of treating sour fruit juice and warm spice as the natural partners of fish. The anchovy here is doing the work that a bottle of anchovy essence or Worcestershire would do in a later kitchen: supplying savour and depth without announcing itself as fish.