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Fried Smelts
Clean smelts, leaving on heads and tails. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in flour, egg, and crumbs, and fry three to four minutes in deep fat. As soon as smelts are put into fat, remove fat to back of range so that they may not become too brown before cooked through. Arrange on hot platter, garnish with parsley, lemon, and fried gelatine. Serve with Sauce Tartare.
Smelts are fried without being skewered, but often are skewered in variety of shapes.
To fry gelatine. Take up a few shreds and drop in hot, deep fat; it will immediately swell and become white; it should at once be removed with a skimmer, then drained. Phosphated or granulated gelatine cannot be used for frying.
Smelts à la Menière Clean six selected smelts, and cut five diagonal gashes on each side. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, cover, and let stand ten minutes. Roll in cream, dip in flour, and sauté in butter. Add to butter in pan two tablespoons flour, one cup White Stock, one and one-third teaspoons Anchovy Essence, and a few drops lemon juice. Just before sauce is poured around smelts, add one and one-half tablespoons butter and one teaspoon finely chopped parsley.
Fried Fillets of Halibut or Flounder Clean fish and cut in long or short fillets. If cut in long fillets, roll, and fasten with small wooden skewers. Sprinkle fillets with salt and pepper, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper. Serve with Sauce Tartare, Fried Fish, Russian Style, Mushroom Sauce Cut two slices chicken halibut in fillets, sprinkle fillets with salt and pepper, pour over one-third cup white wine, cover, and let stand thirty minutes. Drain, dip each piece separately in heavy cream, then in flour, and fry in deep fat. Cook skin and bones removed from fish with five slices carrot, two slices onion, sprig parsley, bit of bay leaf, one-fourth teaspoon peppercorns, and two cups cold water until reduced to one cup liquid. Make sauce of two tablespoons butter, three tablespoons flour, the fish stock, and one-third cup heavy cream. Add yolks two eggs, salt, pepper, cayenne, and white wine to taste.
Arrange fish on serving dish, cover with one-half pound mushroom caps cleaned, then sautéd in butter, and pour over sauce.
A deep-fry recipe from the era when the frying kettle sat on a coal range and heat was managed by sliding the pot rather than turning a dial. The main adjustments are temperature control and two ingredients that have effectively left the market.
- Fat temperatureSmelts want fat at about 375F to set the crumb quickly. The instruction to move the kettle to the back of the range is a heat reduction: on a modern burner, drop the flame as soon as the fish go in so the coating does not colour before the flesh, which is only a few minutes' work at three to four minutes total.
- Buying smeltsAsk for whole rainbow smelt, 4 to 6 inches. "Clean" means gutting through the belly or gill; the heads, tails, and fine backbones stay, and the bones are soft enough to eat once fried. Six to eight fish per person is a fair main course, three or four as an appetizer.
- Fried gelatineThe garnish uses shredded gelatine, the form the recipe assumes ('take up a few shreds'), which puffs white in hot fat. The book is right that granulated will not do it; 'phosphated' gelatine is no longer on the market. Sheet gelatine is still sold to pastry cooks, though it is not certain it behaves identically. Either way the garnish is now a curiosity; parsley and lemon carry the plate perfectly well.
- Coating orderThe smelts take flour, egg, crumbs; the halibut fillets take crumbs, egg, crumbs. The book gives no reason for the difference; a first dusting of dry crumbs may simply give the egg something to grip on wet fillets. Either works, but keep one hand dry and one wet or the breading builds on your fingers.
- Anchovy essenceA thin bottled anchovy extract, once standard in English and American larders. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest thing now; use about half the volume called for, since it is more concentrated and salty, and taste before adding salt to the sauce.
- White stockIn this book, a light stock from veal or chicken bones with no browning. Unsalted chicken stock is a fair stand-in. For the Russian-style dish, the fish stock made from the halibut skin and bones needs about 30 to 40 minutes to reduce two cups to one; do not push it longer or it turns bitter and gluey.
- Chicken halibutA market term for a small halibut; sources put the range anywhere from about 5 to 20 lb. The recipe's 'two slices' means two steaks. Any firm white fillet of similar thickness will behave the same way.
- Meunière spelling and methodPrinted here as "Menière." Rolling the scored fish in cream before flouring is unusual but sound: it gives the flour something to cling to and browns well in butter. Use clarified butter or add a little oil, since whole butter at sauté heat will blacken before the fish is done.
- DrainingBrown paper meant grocer's bag paper. Use a rack over a sheet pan; paper towels underneath a rack are fine, but fish sitting directly on absorbent paper steams its own crust soft.
Smelt were a New England staple when this book was written, netted in enormous numbers during their late-winter and early-spring runs up coastal rivers, and cheap enough to be a weeknight fish rather than a luxury. Their small soft bones made them one of the few fish eaten whole, head and tail included. The surrounding material is pure turn-of-the-century restaurant French filtered through a Boston cooking school: sauce tartare, an anchovy-sharpened meuni"u00e8re, and a "Russian style" fillet finished with cream, egg yolks, and sautéed mushroom caps. The fried gelatine garnish belongs to the same impulse — a bit of showmanship from the professional kitchen, taught to housekeepers who were being trained to plate as well as to cook.