Fried Smelts
Cut off the tails and split open, and take out the backbone and insides. Wash and wipe dry. Sprinkle inside and out with salt and pepper, and fry in hot fat. Serve with sauce tartare. Or crumb them and saute in drippings and serve with Hollandaise of sauce piquante.
Another way is to open the smelts at the gills and press out the insides by drawing them through the thumb and fingers from the tail end. Wash out the opening, press dry, cut off the tail, dust with salt and pepper, roll in flour or white cornmeal, or half of each, and fry in deep, hot drippings until crisp and browned.
A working set of variations on the same fish rather than one fixed recipe: pan-fried split smelts, breaded sautéed smelts, and whole smelts gutted through the gills and deep-fried. The last is the version worth doing.
- Fat temperatureThe book gives no figure. "Deep, hot drippings" corresponds in modern terms to somewhere around 365-375F: much cooler and the coating absorbs fat and the fish steams, much hotter and the flour scorches before the flesh sets. Smelts are small enough that a few minutes per batch is enough.
- DrippingsBacon and beef drippings were common frying fats in this period and give a distinctly savoury result. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works, but lard or bacon fat is closer to the original.
- Gutting through the gillsThe third method leaves the fish largely intact so it fries as a tube and stays juicy. Pinch behind the gill covers, then draw the viscera forward from the tail with thumb and forefinger, as the text describes. On small smelts the backbone is usually left in and eaten; frying softens it considerably.
- Size and yieldThe recipe specifies no size or quantity. Allow 1/3 to 1/2 lb per person as a first course, more as a main. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop below temperature.
- Flour or white cornmealFlour gives a thin, tender crust; white cornmeal a coarser, crisper one. The half-and-half mix the book offers combines the two, and flour and cornmeal coatings remain common for small fried fish. Dust just before frying or the coating turns pasty.
- "Crumb them"Standard breading of the period: flour, then beaten egg, then dry breadcrumbs. The book attaches this coating to the shallow sauté in drippings rather than to the deep fat.
- The saucesSauce tartare is a raw-egg mayonnaise and hollandaise a barely-cooked egg emulsion, so make both fresh; tartare should be kept cold, hollandaise held just warm. Sauce piquante here means a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, shallot and chopped gherkin or capers.
- Drying the fishThe instruction to wipe or press dry is the one step that decides whether the coating adheres and whether the fat spits. Blot the cavity as well as the skin.
Smelts were among the cheap fish of the nineteenth-century North American table, running in great numbers in the rivers of the Northeast and sold by the pound in spring. (Rainbow smelt became a major Great Lakes fishery only in the twentieth century, after their introduction there.) Because they are small, oily and eaten more or less whole, frying was the commonest treatment, and cookbooks of this era tend to give exactly what this entry gives: several interchangeable methods of cleaning and coating, then one of the standard French sauces to lift the plate. The tartare and hollandaise pairings show how far restaurant-French vocabulary had entered American household compilations by the turn of the century, attached here to a fish that cost almost nothing. Where smelt runs survive they are still fished for the same purpose, and the gill-gutting method described in the last sentence is still in use.