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Broiled Boned Smelts, Maitre D'Hotel
Neatly wipe twelve fresh large smelts, split open through the stomach without separating them, then remove the bones, being careful not to cut them through. Mix on a plate one teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and one tablespoon oil; carefully roll the smelts into the seasoning, arrange on a double broiler and broil for four minutes on each side, remove, dress on a hot, large dish, pour a maitre d'hotel butter over them and serve.
A fast, plain preparation that depends almost entirely on the fish being fresh and the fire being hot. Everything here happens in under ten minutes, so have the butter made before the smelts go near the heat.
- The hinge: make the butter firstMaitre d'hotel butter is softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper — roughly 4 oz butter to 2 tablespoons parsley and the juice of half a lemon. It is meant to melt over the hot fish at the table, not to be cooked, so it must be ready and at cool room temperature when the smelts come off.
- "Double broiler"Not a double boiler. This is a hinged wire grill basket that clamps the fish between two grids so they can be turned as a unit over coals. A fish grilling basket does the same job on a gas grill; under a domestic overhead broiler, use a preheated rack on a sheet pan and turn each fish once with a thin spatula.
- Boning smeltsSplit along the belly, press the fish open flat, then lift the backbone from the tail end and snip it free at the head. Smelts are small enough that the pin bones come away with it. Fishmongers will often do this; ask for them butterflied, head on or off as you prefer.
- Four minutes a sideThat timing suits a hot open fire or period broiler and fish of a fair size (the recipe says only 'large'). Under a modern broiler at full heat, boned smelts opened flat cook in about 2 minutes a side — they are thin, and overcooked smelt turns dry and cottony. Go by the flesh turning opaque and the skin blistering.
- The oilOne tablespoon for twelve fish is barely a film, which is the intention: enough to keep them from welding to the grid. Use a neutral oil with a high smoke point rather than olive oil under a fierce broiler.
- Buying smeltsSold frozen more often than fresh, usually as rainbow smelt. Thaw fully and pat very dry, or they will steam rather than brown. Fresh smelt famously smell faintly of cucumber; anything strongly fishy is past use.
- YieldTwelve large smelts serve three or four as a first course, two as a main. Serve at once on a heated dish with lemon wedges — the butter congeals quickly on cold china.
Smelts were cheap, abundant and enormously popular in American restaurants and homes around 1900, running in vast spring shoals along both coasts; they appear in period cookbooks fried whole by the dozen, skewered in rings, or, as here, given the more genteel treatment of boning and broiling. Maitre d'hotel butter — parsley, lemon, seasoning worked into soft butter — is one of the standard French compound butters codified in nineteenth-century professional kitchens, and its name is traditionally said to signal the dining-room manager's style: quick, unfussy, finished in front of the guest. The pairing of a humble fish with a classic French finish is characteristic of the restaurant cookbooks that moved professional technique into domestic kitchens, and it explains the recipe's insistence on neat boning and a large hot dish: this is a modest fish dressed for company.