Fried Smelts
Sprinkle with salt, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs again. Fry in deep fat. Serve with sauce tartare.
A four-sentence recipe that assumes you already know how to handle a small fish and a kettle of deep fat. The gaps are all in the preparation and the frying temperature.
- Buying and cleaningSmelts run 3-6 inches and are sold whole, often frozen. Traditionally they are gutted through the gill opening with the head and tail left on; larger ones can simply be slit along the belly. The backbone is soft enough to eat in the smallest fish; in larger ones it can be lifted out after frying by pulling on the head.
- Dry them firstThe recipe does not mention it. Wet skin sheds breading in hot fat, so blot each smelt thoroughly before salting.
- "Crumbs, egg, and crumbs"The sequence looks reversed; a first light coat of crumbs would give the egg something to cling to. Beat the egg with a tablespoon of water or milk to thin it. Dry fine breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs both work; panko gives a coarser crust than the fine crumbs implied here.
- Deep fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. About 375F suits small breaded fish, the point at which a bread cube browns in roughly 40 seconds by the usual period test. Lard and beef-fat blends were common frying fats; any neutral oil with a high smoke point will serve.
- TimingSmelts are done in 2-3 minutes, when the crust is deep gold. They are small and thin, and much longer dries them to fibre. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop below temperature.
- Sauce tartareIn this period the name generally meant mayonnaise with chopped capers, pickles or gherkins, parsley and a little onion or shallot. Modern commercial tartar sauce tends to be sweeter; mixing your own with a squeeze of lemon is likely closer to the mark.
- YieldFigure 1/3 to 1/2 pound of whole smelts per person as a first course, more as a main dish. Serve immediately with lemon wedges; they do not hold well.
Smelts were cheap and plentiful in the period this book was written. The fish spawn in large spring runs up coastal streams from the Canadian Maritimes through New England, which meant they arrived at market in quantity. That abundance may explain the brevity of the entry: The Butterick Cook Book (1911) could assume its readers knew what a smelt was and needed only the sequence of dips and the sauce to go with it. Whole small fish fried in deep fat and served with a cold mayonnaise-based sauce was a common American treatment of the era, and egg-and-crumb breading recurs in the fish chapters of household manuals of the time.