Smelts, Baked
to taste. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d. to 2s. per. INGREDIENTS.- 12 smelts, bread-crumbs, 1/4 lb. of fresh butter, 2 blades of pounded mace; salt and cayenne to taste. dozen.
SNIPES, TO DRESS.
AVERAGE COST, 18. 6d. to 2s. per Wash, and dry the fish thoroughly in a cloth, and arrange them nicely in a flat baking-dish. Cover them with fine breadcrumbs, and place little pieces of butter all over them. Season, and bake for 15 minutes.
Just before serving, add a squeeze of lemonjuice, and garnish with fried parsley and cut lemon.
SEASONABLE from October to May.
Sufficient for 6 persons.
A very short, very simple bake that depends entirely on dry fish and a hot enough oven; everything else is seasoning.
- Oven temperatureMrs Beeton gives no heat, but 15 minutes for small whole fish means a fairly brisk oven: 400F/200C. Lower than that and the crumbs stay pale and the butter poaches the fish rather than crisping it.
- Dry the fish properlyThis is the hinge of the dish. Smelts hold surface water, and any that remains will steam the crumb coating into paste. Pat them thoroughly, inside and out, and let them sit uncovered on paper for a few minutes before crumbing.
- The butter quantityA quarter pound (115 g) over twelve small fish is generous by modern taste and will pool in the dish. Two to three ounces (55-85 g), dotted in small pieces, browns the crumbs without swimming them.
- Blades of maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg; "blades" are the whole dried pieces, which she pounds in a mortar. Ground mace from a jar works, but use it sparingly - about a quarter teaspoon for the whole dish - as it is much finer and spreads further through the dish than freshly pounded blades.
- Buying smeltsSold whole, usually a few inches long, often frozen. Ask for them gutted, or slit and clean them yourself; heads and tails stay on, and the small bones are eaten with the fish. Sparling is the same fish as the European smelt; the sand smelt is a different species sold in much the same way.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop hissing and turn brilliant green, then drained on paper. They must be bone dry going in.
- Yield"Sufficient for 6 persons" means two fish each, which suits a first course in a long Victorian meal. As a modern starter allow four to five smelts a head, as a main course eight to ten, and scale the crumbs and butter accordingly.
Smelts were a prized small fish in nineteenth-century Britain, netted in estuaries in the cold months - hence the October to May season Mrs Beeton gives - and valued as much for their smell as their taste, the fresh fish having a distinct scent of cucumber or violets that cooks used as a test of freshness. In Scotland and the north they were and are called sparling. Thames and Medway smelts had a particular reputation, and their decline as the rivers grew filthier through the century is part of the reason the fish slipped from English menus while remaining familiar in North America and around the Baltic. The treatment here - crumbed, buttered, briefly baked, finished with lemon and fried parsley - belongs to the broad Victorian repertoire for small delicate fish, though such fish were more characteristically floured or egg-and-crumbed and fried.