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Baked Smelts
Clean eighteen or twenty smelts, wipe them very dry, and put them on a baking dish with two tablespoonfuls of cooked fine herbs, one-half wineglassful of white wine, one-half pinch of salt, one-half pinch of pepper, and cover with six whole mushrooms and one-half pint of Spanish sauce. Sprinkle lightly with breadcrumbs and a little warmed butter, place the dish in a hot oven for ten minutes, and serve with the juice of half a lemon, and sprinkle over one teaspoonful of chopped parsley. The smelts can be boned if desired. Smelts, Bearnaise Split twelve large or eighteen medium-sized smelts down the backs, remove the backbones, rub them with one tablespoonful of oil and season with one-half pinch of salt and one-third of a pinch of pepper. Broil them in a double broiler for two minutes on each side, pour a little over one gill of Bearnaise sauce on a dish, arrange the smelts carefully on top, garnishing with a very little demi-glaze sauce round the dish and serve.
Smelts, Boulangere Clean and dry the fish on a cloth, dip them into very thick cream and then dredge them thickly over with flour forming a paste round them. Put some lard in a fryingpan and when very hot put the fish in and fry them till of a light golden brown. Arrange the smelts on a dish paper or a folded napkin placed on a hot dish, garnish with fried parsley and serve.
Three smelt preparations run together here as a single block of type, as they often do in Oscar's book: baked with Spanish sauce, broiled with Bearnaise, and cream-dipped and fried. All three assume a kitchen with sauces already standing on the stove.
- Get the fish very dryEvery one of the three hinges on dry fish. Wet smelts steam under the crumbs, refuse to take flour, and spit in hot lard. Wipe them and let them sit uncovered on a rack in the refrigerator if you have time.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperatures. Something in the region of 425-450F suits. Ten minutes at that heat is about right for whole smelts of ordinary size; they are done the moment the flesh at the thickest point turns opaque.
- Spanish sauce and demi-glazeSauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce of veal stock, mirepoix and browned roux, and its reduction. Neither is a five-minute proposition. A well-made brown veal or beef stock reduced to a light glaze is the practical substitute.
- Cooked fine herbsNot a raw sprinkle of fines herbes but herbs sweated in butter; such a mixture in period kitchens generally ran to shallot and parsley, often with mushroom, closer to a loose duxelles.
- The measuresA gill is half a cup, so "a little over one gill" of Bearnaise is a little over half a cup. A wineglassful in period American receipts is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, which would make the half wineglass roughly 2 tablespoons. Oscar's "pinch" is his own shorthand and is nowhere defined; season by taste.
- Double broilerA hinged wire fish grill that clamps the fish between two frames so they can be turned in one motion without breaking. A modern grill basket does the same job, and two minutes a side over strong heat is genuinely all boned smelts need.
- Boning smeltsSplit down the back, run a thumb under the backbone from the head end and lift it out with the ribs attached. Small smelts are usually eaten bones and all; the boning is worth it only on the larger fish, as the Bearnaise version specifies.
- Frying fat and drainageThe recipe says only that the lard should be very hot; a frying temperature in the region of 350-375F will give the light golden colour called for, and any neutral fat with a high smoke point will do. The "dish paper" is simply an absorbent paper doily, and the folded napkin serves the same purpose of soaking up fat.
- YieldEighteen to twenty smelts will serve about four as a main course, more as a first course. Where they are sold at all they are usually frozen, and are sometimes labelled by their Great Lakes or Atlantic origin.
Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms and put his name to this 1896 collection, was writing at a time when the American smelt was well established on eastern tables. The little fish ran in enormous numbers in the Hudson and the New England rivers each spring, arrived cheap and fresh at the eastern markets, and so appeared on hotel menus in a dozen guises rather than one. The book gives them a run of consecutive recipes: baked under a brown sauce, broiled and dressed with Bearnaise, and floured and fried in the manner labelled boulangere. The names attached, Bearnaise and demi-glace and sauce espagnole, mark the book as a product of the Escoffier-era brigade kitchen, where a cook did not build a sauce for a single order but drew it from a pot that had been going since morning. The instruction to serve on a folded napkin is a hotel convention of the period, meant to keep fried fish crisp on its way from the kitchen to the table.