No. 1268

Smelts, Diplomatic

Eperlans Diplomate

Have large fresh smelts cut off the fins, the dorsal, remove the eyes, split the fish open through the back, suppress the gills and sever the spinal bone a little below the head, and just above the tail, then detach and remove it. Salt the insides and fill them through a cornet with fish forcemeat (No. 90) mixed with cooked fine herbs (No. 385) and chopped truffles; shape them into rings by slipping the tail through the gill and mouth so that they bite their tails; tie to keep well together, then flour them lightly; dip each one into raw egg-yolks beaten up with melted butter, drain, and then roll them in white bread-crumbs. Heat some butter in a raised-edged baking pan, range the fish in this butter, one beside the other, and push it into a moderate oven to cook on both sides; the butter should be plentiful and very hot. Drain the smelts as soon as they are done, untie, and dress them on a long dish with a bunch of fried parsley at each end. Serve a separate lobster sauce (No. 488).

← No. 1267 Smelts a la Norfolk Shad, Herring & Mackerel No. 1269 Fried Smelts, on Skewers, Tartar Truffle Sau →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a cook who can bone a smelt through the back in one motion and who has quenelle forcemeat, duxelles and lobster sauce already standing by. The dish is straightforward once those are in hand; the fiddly part is the boning and the ring.

The hinge: bone it through the back, not the bellySplitting along the spine and lifting the backbone out from just under the head to just above the tail leaves the belly wall intact, so it holds forcemeat like a pocket. Cut through the belly and the filling escapes in the pan.
Buy the biggest smelts you canThe recipe specifies "large" fish, and for good reason: small smelts cannot be boned and stuffed this way, nor bent into a ring.
"Through a cornet"A cornet is a piping bag or a rolled paper cone. Any piping bag with a plain half-inch tip does the job; do not overfill.
The forcemeat and the fine herbsNo. 90 is the book's fish forcemeat, of the pounded-fish quenelle type; a food processor makes short work of it. No. 385 "cooked fine herbs" is a duxelles-type mixture of mushroom, shallot and herbs cooked down dry. Truffle is a garnish of luxury here, not a structural ingredient, and can simply be left out.
Making them bite their tailsThread the tail through the gill slit and out the mouth, then secure with a short length of kitchen twine or a toothpick. Chill the tied rings for twenty minutes before breading so the forcemeat firms and the shape sets.
"A moderate oven" and plentiful hot butterModerate is usually read as somewhere around 350-375F, but note what is really happening: this is shallow-frying in the oven. Preheat the butter in the pan until it foams before the fish go in, or the crumb crust absorbs fat instead of crisping. Turn once; fish this size cook through very quickly, so watch them rather than a clock.
Clarified butter is safer than wholeWhole butter at frying heat browns and can catch. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, gives the same flavor with more margin.
Lobster sauceNo. 488 is the book's lobster sauce, a white-sauce base enriched with lobster. Serve it in a boat alongside, as directed; poured over, it softens the crust the recipe works so hard to build.
Fried parsleyDry the sprigs thoroughly and fry in clean hot fat for a few seconds only. Wet parsley in hot fat spatters badly.

A Little History

Smelts were cheap, abundant and enormously fashionable in nineteenth-century America, netted in quantity in the rivers and estuaries of the Northeast, which is why Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's, gives them a long run of numbered preparations in The Epicurean (1894). The name "Diplomate" belongs to a family of French kitchen titles — diplomate pudding, sauce diplomate — that generally signal a dressed-up, truffle-and-lobster treatment fit for a formal table rather than any specific embassy dinner. Curling a small fish so it bites its own tail is an old European service trick, most familiar from truite en colère and fried whiting, and it survived into the grand-restaurant repertoire precisely because it turned a cheap fish into something that looked deliberate on a silver platter. The recipe is a fair snapshot of Ranhofer's method throughout the book: no dish is finished until it has been boned, stuffed, shaped, breaded and given a sauce of its own from elsewhere in the volume.