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Stuffed Smelts
Cut off the fins of eighteen or twenty fresh medium-sized Long Island smelts and wash and dry them well; remove the insides without splitting the stomachs open, then stuff them with a fish forcemeat, using a paper cornet for the purpose. Place the smelts on a well-buttered baking dish (silver if possible), and cover them with one pint of Italian sauce. Place them in a hot oven and bake for eight or ten minutes; remove, squeeze over the juice of a lemon and serve in the same dish.
Smelts, Toulouse Take twelve or fourteen good-sized smelts, remove the bones and then close them up again. Put them in a stewpan with one-half wineglassful of white wine and three tablespoonfuls of mushroom liquor; season with one-half pinch of salt and one-third pinch of pepper and cook over a moderate fire for six or eight minutes. Arrange the smelts on a dish; add to the sauce a dozen button mushrooms, two sliced truffles, six fish quenelles, and moisten with one-half pint of allemande sauce. Thicken with one tablespoonful of butter and pour the sauce over the smelts. Neatly dress the garnishing round the dish and serve with sippets of toast or croutons of fried bread.
Two smelt preparations run together on the page: a baked, stuffed version under an Italian sauce, and a stewed version finished with allemande. Both assume a professional larder where the sauces already exist, so the real work is deciding what to build and what to buy.
- The hinge: cleaning without splittingThe whole point of the first recipe is a smelt that stays a closed tube so it can be piped full of forcemeat. Draw the insides out through the gill opening with the tip of a small knife or a hook, keeping the belly intact.
- Paper cornetA cone rolled from parchment with the tip snipped off — a disposable piping bag. A small plain tip in a piping bag does the same job; the opening wants to be narrow enough to enter the gill or vent.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a 'hot oven' of the period is usually read as somewhere around 425-450F. Eight to ten minutes at that heat suits a fish of this size; smelts are small and go dry and cottony if held longer.
- Italian sauceIn Oscar's kitchen this is sauce italienne: a brown or white base with finely chopped mushrooms (duxelles), shallot, white wine and herbs. A pint is a generous pint for eighteen fish — enough to blanket them.
- Allemande sauceA veloute enriched with egg yolk and cream, sharpened with lemon. It will curdle if boiled hard after the yolks go in, so the final tablespoon of butter is best stirred in off the heat.
- Wineglassful and mushroom liquorA wineglass in this period is about 2 fl oz, so half a glass is roughly 2 tablespoons. Mushroom liquor is the strained cooking liquid from button mushrooms; canned mushroom packing liquid is the nearest substitute.
- Quenelles and trufflesFish quenelles are made from a fish forcemeat of the kind used as stuffing above, poached in spoon-shaped ovals. Two sliced truffles is a garnish written when truffles were used far more freely than now; a few thin slices, or a small amount of good truffle in oil, reads the same on the plate.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter, set round the edge of the dish.
- YieldEighteen to twenty smelts serves six as a first course, four as a main. The Toulouse version, with twelve to fourteen larger fish and a heavy garnish, serves four.
- SourcingLong Island smelts are no longer a reliable market fish; rainbow smelt from the Great Lakes or Atlantic Canada, often sold frozen, are the same size and behave identically. Buy them whole and ungutted if you can.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf's kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, when the smelt was a fashionable New York fish — small, silvery, running up the coastal rivers in spring and cheap enough to be served by the dozen. Both preparations here are pure escoffier-era hotel cooking: the fish is a vehicle for the sauce and garnish, and the recipe assumes a brigade with velouté, allemande, duxelles and forcemeat already standing on the stove. "Toulouse" as a garnish name is generally traced to the classical repertoire's garniture à la toulousaine — quenelles, mushrooms and truffles bound in a pale sauce — and it was applied indiscriminately to sweetbreads, chicken and, as here, fish. The instruction to bake in a silver dish and serve in the same dish is a note about the dining room, not the kitchen; the vessel went to the table.