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Smelts à la Langtry
Split and bone eight selected smelts. Cut off tails, and from tail ends of fish turn meat over one inch onto flesh side. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and brush over with lemon juice. Garnish with Fish Force-meat forced through a pastry bag and tube, and fasten heads with skewers to keep in an upright position. Arrange in a buttered pan, and pour around white wine. Cover with buttered paper, and bake from fifteen to twenty minutes. Just before taking from oven, sprinkle with lobster coral forced through a strainer. Serve with Aurora Sauce.
Aurora Sauce. Melt three tablespoons butter, add three tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually one and one-half cups cream and one tablespoon meat extract. Season with salt and cayenne, and add lobster coral and one-half cup lobster dice.
Baked Shad Roe with Tomato Sauce Cook shad roe fifteen minutes in boiling salted water to cover, with one-half tablespoon vinegar; drain, cover with cold water, and let stand five minutes. Remove from cold water, and place on buttered pan with three-fourths cup Tomato Sauce I or II. Bake twenty minutes in hot oven, basting every five minutes. Remove to a platter, and pour around three-fourths cup Tomato Sauce.
Baked Fillets of Bass or Halibut Cut bass or halibut into small fillets, sprinkle with salt and pepper, put into a shallow pan, cover with buttered paper, and bake twelve minutes in hot oven. Arrange on a rice border, garnish with parsley, and serve with Hollandaise Sauce II. Fillets of Halibut with Brown Sauce Cut a slice of halibut weighing one and one-half pounds in eight short fillets, sprinkle with salt and pepper, put in greased pan, and bake five minutes; drain, pour over one and one-half cups Brown Sauce I, cover with one-half cup buttered cracker crumbs, and bake.
Fillets of Haddock, White Wine Sauce Skin a three and one-half pound haddock, and cut in fillets. Arrange in buttered baking-pan, pour around fish three tablespoons melted butter, three-fourths cup white wine to which has been added one-half tablespoon lemon juice, and two slices onion. Cover and bake. Melt two tablespoons butter, add two tablespoons flour, and pour on liquor drained from fish; then add one-half cup Fish Stock (made from head, tail, and bones of fish), two tablespoons heavy cream, yolks two eggs, salt, and pepper. Remove fillets to serving dish, pour over sauce strained through cheesecloth, and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
A restaurant plate from Fannie Farmer's fish chapter, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knows what fish force-meat and lobster coral are. The page bundles five separate baked-fish recipes; the notes below cover the smelts first and the others after.
- Oven temperatureFarmer gives no number for the smelts. Bake at 400F for the 15 to 20 minutes stated; the "hot oven" called for in the shad roe and bass fillets that follow is usually rendered as roughly 400-450F.
- Buttered paperParchment cut to fit the pan and buttered on the underside. It keeps the force-meat from drying and browning while the thin fish cooks through, and it is not optional here — foil pressed down will stick to the piped garnish.
- SmeltsWhole rainbow smelt, about 5-7 inches, sold frozen or in season at fishmongers. Eight of them make a first course for four, or a main for two. Split and boned means butterflied through the belly with the backbone lifted out, head left on.
- Fish force-meatFarmer's own preparation elsewhere in the book: raw white fish pounded with egg white, seasoning and cream, essentially a mousseline. A food processor does in a minute what she did in a mortar. It must be cold to pipe cleanly.
- Lobster coralThe roe of a female lobster, black-green when raw and turning coral red when cooked. Push it through a fine sieve for the powdery scarlet dusting. If you have no lobster, the dish loses its colour and the Aurora sauce loses half its point — sweet paprika is a colour substitute only.
- Meat extractConcentrated beef extract of the Liebig or Bovril type, still sold, and very salty. The recipe's tablespoon is a substantial amount; a modern beef base can stand in for it. Season the sauce at the end, after it goes in.
- SkewersWooden cocktail sticks. The heads are pinned so each fish stands curled and upright in the pan; this is presentation, not cookery, and the sticks come out before serving.
- Shad roeThe parboil-then-shock step firms the membrane so the roe does not burst in the oven. Shad runs are closed or heavily restricted in much of the Atlantic coast now, and roe is a spring-only, ask-ahead purchase.
- The haddock sauceTwo egg yolks go into the finished velouté. Add them off the heat, stirred into a little of the hot sauce first, and do not let the pan boil afterwards or the sauce will curdle before it strains.
The garnish of piped force-meat and the dusting of coral are pure Escoffier-era restaurant practice, and Aurora sauce takes its name from the dawn: a pale cream velouté tinted red, here by lobster coral rather than the tomato purée used in the more common French version. Fannie Farmer put such dishes in the Boston Cooking-School book not because Boston households were making them every week but because the school trained women who might cook for company or for wages, and the fish chapter runs deliberately from boiled cod up to plates a hotel would recognise. Smelts themselves were the cheap end of that scale — they ran in enormous numbers in New England rivers each spring — which made this a luxury dish built on a bargain fish.