Fried Smelts
Wash, dry thoroughly, and sprinkle smelts with salt, pepper and flour; dip in beaten egg which has also been seasoned with salt and pepper; drain and dip in flour, meal, or sifted bread crumbs.
The fish must be completely covered with egg and crumbs. Fry in deep fat, first testing fat with a crumb of bread, which should brown delicately in one minute. Smelts may be cooked with their heads on, or the backbone may be removed and the fish rolled up in the shape of a muff, or they may be skewered in the shape of a ring. When fried, drain on brown paper and serve on hot platter; garnish with lemon baskets filled with mayonnaise dressing and parsley. Any small fish may be fried in the same way; large fish are generally cut in fillets, prepared and fried in the same way. 2 tablespoons butter
A straightforward deep-fry that depends almost entirely on a complete, unbroken coating and fat at the right heat. Lowney's gives no temperature, quantity or time, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- Fat temperatureThe bread-crumb test — browning delicately in one minute — points to somewhere in the region of 350–375F. Smelts are small enough to cook through in 2 to 3 minutes at that heat; hotter fat colors the crumbs before the fish is done.
- The hinge: dry the fish"Dry thoroughly" is the instruction that decides the dish. Any surface moisture makes the flour slick, the egg slides, and the coating blisters off in the fat. Pat each fish with paper towel and flour it just before it goes into the egg.
- The stray butterThe trailing "2 tablespoons butter" belongs to no step in this recipe and is almost certainly a typesetting slip from an adjacent entry. Ignore it; nothing here is fried in butter.
- "Meal"In a 1907 American book this most likely means cornmeal, fine or medium grind. It fries crisper than bread crumbs.
- DrainingBrown paper meant unbleached grocery wrap. Use a wire rack over a sheet pan instead — paper towel directly under the fish traps steam and softens the underside.
- Heads on, and bonesSmelt bones are soft enough to eat and the whole fish is traditionally served intact. To bone them, slit the belly, pull the head and the attached viscera and backbone away in one motion; that is what makes the "muff" roll possible. Skewering into a ring means curving the fish head to tail and fixing it there with a short skewer or toothpick.
- Lemon basketsA lemon halved crosswise, the flesh scooped out, the shell notched or the peel cut into a handle. They hold mayonnaise for the table; a wedge of lemon and a bowl of mayonnaise does the same work.
- YieldSmelts run 8 to 12 to the pound. Allow about 1/3 lb per person as a course, more if they are the center of the plate. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop below 350F.
Smelts — in New England almost always the rainbow smelt, Osmerus mordax — were a cheap, seasonal glut fish that ran up coastal rivers to spawn in late winter and early spring. They appear in a promotional cookbook issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer: a book aimed at ordinary Massachusetts households could assume its readers had cheap fresh smelts in season and a kettle of frying fat on the stove. The showy finishing touches here — the muff, the ring, the lemon basket filled with mayonnaise — belong to the Boston Cooking School style of the period, in which even a humble pan fish was expected to arrive at the table shaped and garnished. Frying in deep fat was standard domestic practice long before thermostatically controlled fryers, and the bread-crumb test given here was the common way of judging heat in kitchens with no thermometer.