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Baked Stuffed Smelts
Clean and wipe as dry as possible twelve selected smelts. Stuff, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and brush over with lemon juice. Place in buttered shallow plate, cover with buttered paper, and bake five minutes in hot oven. Remove from oven, sprinkle with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown. Serve with Sauce Bearnaise.
Stuffing. Cook one tablespoon finely chopped onion with one tablespoon butter three minutes. Add one-fourth cup finely chopped mushrooms, one-fourth cup soft part of oysters (parboiled, drained, and chopped), one-half teaspoon chopped parsley, three tablespoons Thick White Sauce, and one-half cup Fish Force-meat.
A restaurant-style dish scaled to a home oven, and the whole thing hinges on speed: smelts are small, and by the time the crumbs have coloured they are done. Have the stuffing, the crumbs and the Béarnaise ready before the fish goes in.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; read this as roughly 400-450F. The first five minutes under buttered paper steams the fish through; the second stage is only to brown the crumbs, a few minutes more.
- Selected smeltsTwelve smelts of roughly 4-5 inches would serve about four as a first course. Ask for them gutted and boned through the belly, or slit them along the belly and lift out the backbone and gut in one pull; the recipe itself says nothing about heads and tails.
- Buttered paperParchment cut to the dish is the direct equivalent, buttered on the underside so it does not stick to the fish. Foil works but reflects heat and slows the browning stage.
- Buttered shallow plateAn ovenproof gratin dish or shallow earthenware baker. The fish should lie in one layer, touching but not overlapping, or the middles will not cook in five minutes.
- Fish force-meatFarmer's force-meat is raw white fish pounded (today, processed) with a bread-and-cream panada, egg and seasoning until smooth: essentially a fish mousseline. Half a cup binds this stuffing; a plain fish mousse from a current recipe substitutes directly.
- Thick White SauceIn this book that is the stiffest of the graded white sauces, made in its own recipe elsewhere; proportions of that order run to roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons each butter and flour to one cup milk. Three tablespoons of it acts purely as a stiffener, so the stuffing holds its shape rather than weeping into the dish.
- Oysters"Soft part" means the body with the tough muscle discarded. Parboil only until the edges ruffle, well under a minute; anything longer and they turn to erasers once the fish is baked.
- CrumbsSoft fresh crumbs tossed in melted butter, about a tablespoon of butter to a third of a cup of crumbs. Dry commercial crumbs scorch before they brown evenly at this temperature.
- BéarnaiseMake it last and hold it barely warm, off heat, in a bowl over water at hand temperature. It will break if kept hot while the fish finishes.
Smelts were a genuine New England staple when this book was written, netted in enormous quantities from tidal rivers in spring and cheap enough that Boston households ate them fried by the platterful. This treatment, though, is not the homely version: stuffing each fish with a force-meat enriched by mushrooms and oysters and finishing with Béarnaise is French restaurant practice, and it shows Fannie Farmer teaching the cooking-school student to work up a familiar cheap fish into a company dish. The chain of cross-references the recipe assumes -- Thick White Sauce, Fish Force-meat, Sauce Béarnaise, all set out elsewhere in the book -- is characteristic of how these volumes were built: master a handful of foundation preparations, then combine them. The smelt runs that made the fish so ordinary have since thinned considerably in much of the Northeast, and what reaches markets now is often frozen or imported.