No. 1269

Fried Smelts, on Skewers, Tartar Truffle Sauce

Eperlans Frits en Brochettes; Sauce Tartare aux Truffes

Choose the smelts of a medium size; empty, clean, and wipe dry, then season and dip a few at the time into milk, then roll quickly in flour, and sift through a very coarse sieve. Take them up by the heads, and run small metal skewers through the eyes, either four or six on each one; plunge them at once into hot frying fat in order to have them a nice color, then drain and salt. Dress the smelts on a folded napkin, garnish with fried parsley and quartered lemons, and serve with a sauce-boat of tartar sauce (No. 631), with chopped truffles added.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward deep-fry from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen; the only real technique is the skewering, which turns a handful of small fish into a single crisp fan for the platter.

The hinge: skewer through the eyesSmall metal skewers (or bamboo, soaked) pass through the eye sockets of four to six smelts so they hang parallel and fry as one piece. Thread them before flouring settles and dampens, and keep the bodies from overlapping or the coating steams instead of crisping.
"Sift through a very coarse sieve"Most likely this means shaking the floured fish over a coarse sieve or colander to knock off excess flour rather than sieving the flour itself, though the line is ambiguous. Either way what should remain is a thin dry film that colors quickly.
Frying fat and temperatureRanhofer says only "hot frying fat" and gives no temperature; modern deep-frying practice for small fish is around 350-375F. Medium smelts will need only a couple of minutes; longer and the delicate flesh dries while the flour darkens. Salt the moment they leave the fat, as the recipe directs.
Cleaning smelts"Empty" means gutting, most easily done by pinching behind the gills and drawing the innards out, leaving the head on since the head carries the skewer. Very small smelts are often fried whole and ungutted; these, being of medium size, are not those.
Fried parsleyCurly parsley must be bone dry before it goes into the fat or it will spit violently. A few seconds is enough; it should stay green, not brown.
The sauceNo. 631 is Ranhofer's tartar sauce, a mayonnaise-based cold sauce; check the cross-reference for its exact composition. The recipe specifies only chopped truffles folded in; a good jarred or preserved truffle stands in, but truffle oil does not.
ServingThe folded napkin on the platter is period presentation; a rack or paper does the same job of catching residual fat. Portioning is not given in the recipe, but the four or six fish per skewer suggest roughly a skewer or two per person as a first course.
Raw egg in the sauceThe tartar sauce is uncooked mayonnaise. If serving anyone pregnant, elderly, or immunocompromised, build it from pasteurized eggs.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits in a run of smelt preparations that shows how seriously the restaurant took a cheap, abundant fish. Smelts ran in enormous numbers in the rivers and along the coasts of the Northeast, and the American appetite for them was such that a fashionable French kitchen gave them several treatments. En brochette simply means on a skewer, and here the skewer is a serving device as much as a cooking one: threaded through the eyes, the fish arrive at the table in a rigid fan, a small piece of theatre in the Delmonico manner. The chopped truffle stirred into ordinary tartar sauce is the same instinct at work, a luxury garnish applied to a fish that cost almost nothing.