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Smelts in Matelote
Put a chopped onion, a sprig of parsley, two or three mushrooms and a small piece of garlic into a saucepan; pour over them a small quantity of oil and season with salt and pepper. Clean the smelts, put them into a stewpan, pour over one teacupful of champagne and let them simmer gently until cooked. Place the smelts on a hot dish, squeeze a little lemon juice over and serve.
A very compressed Waldorf recipe: the aromatics are prepared in one pan, the fish poached in another, and Oscar leaves you to put the two together. Read it as a fish poached in wine with a warm vegetable garnish spooned over.
- The missing stepAs printed, the onion, parsley, mushrooms and garlic never meet the smelts. Sweat them in the oil until soft, then either add them to the stewpan with the champagne or spoon them over the fish at the end.
- TeacupfulA teacup in this period is usually reckoned at about 6 fl oz, three-quarters of a modern cup, though period usage varied and some sources put it lower. That is enough to come partway up a single layer of smelts in a wide pan, not to cover them.
- TimingSmelts are finger-sized and cook in three to four minutes at a bare simmer. "Until cooked" here means the flesh has just turned opaque at the backbone; another five minutes and they collapse into the liquid.
- Cleaning smeltsSnip off the head and pull the viscera out with it, or leave them whole and gutted — the bones are soft enough to eat. Rinse and pat dry so the wine is not diluted.
- The champagneAny dry sparkling wine works, and the bubbles are irrelevant once it is hot; what matters is that it be dry, since a demi-sec turns the pan liquor cloyingly sweet. A dry still white is a reasonable substitute.
- The wine left in the panThe recipe leaves the poaching liquid unaccounted for. If you want the dish to read as a matelote, reduce it by half after the fish comes out, whisk in a knob of cold butter, and pour it around the smelts.
- YieldA pound of smelts, roughly eight to twelve fish, serves two as a first course. Scale the wine so the pan is never crowded — poach in batches rather than stacking.
Matelote comes from the French matelot, sailor: originally a rough freshwater fish stew simmered in wine with onions and mushrooms, the kind of thing made on a riverbank with whatever the net gave up. By the time it reached the Waldorf it had been thoroughly gentrified — the eel and cheap wine of the traditional dish replaced by delicate smelts and a teacupful of champagne, the stew reduced to a quick poach and a garnish. Smelts were plentiful and inexpensive in Northeastern American markets at the turn of the century, running up the rivers of the region in great numbers, which is part of why they appear so often in hotel cookery of the period: a luxurious treatment applied to a genuinely cheap fish. Oscar Tschirky's book is full of this move, and the champagne is doing much of the work the name promises.