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Curried Smelts
Prepare and keep hot a curry sauce. Cut off the heads of two pounds of small fresh smelts and cut them into half inch pieces; place in a frying pan with half a gill white wine, half ounce butter, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons paprika. Mix them gently. Cover with a sheet of buttered paper; place in oven for ten minutes. Remove, pour the curry sauce over smelts, lightly mix, cook on range for five minutes, and serve in a hot, deep dish.
A quick braise-then-sauce method that depends entirely on a curry sauce made in advance; the fish itself is in and out of the heat in fifteen minutes.
- Make the sauce firstThe recipe assumes a curry sauce is already simmering elsewhere in the book. Have roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of a smooth, well-seasoned curry sauce hot and ready before the fish goes near the oven, since nothing here allows time to build one.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making two saltspoons of paprika 1/2 teaspoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only "place in oven." A moderate oven, somewhere around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for setting half-inch pieces through in ten minutes.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche. Cut parchment to fit the pan, butter one side, and lay it butter-side down directly on the fish so it traps steam and keeps the surface from drying. Foil will do but seals more tightly and stews rather than steams.
- Watch the total cooking timeSmelts are thin and lean. Ten minutes covered plus five in the sauce is the outer limit for half-inch pieces; if your fish are on the larger side, check at seven minutes in the oven and give the sauce stage only enough time to heat through. Overcooked smelt goes dry and cottony.
- Heads off, bones inCutting small smelts crosswise into half-inch pieces leaves the fine backbone in place, which is normal for this fish and eats perfectly well. If you would rather not serve bones, buy cleaned smelts and leave them whole rather than cutting them up.
- SourcingFresh smelts appear seasonally and are often sold frozen the rest of the year; thawed frozen smelt work here. If none are available, small whole sardines or fresh anchovies behave similarly, though they are oilier.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds serves four as a main course with rice. The deep hot dish matters: the sauce is loose and the fish cools fast in a shallow platter.
The International Cook Book is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it reflects the late-Victorian and Edwardian habit of filing dishes by nationality while cooking them all in a French restaurant idiom. That is exactly what happens here: curry powder and a made curry sauce, but the technique is a classic cuisson under buttered paper with wine and butter, finished on the range. Smelts were cheap and abundant in the period, netted in enormous numbers during their spring runs into coastal rivers; cookbooks of the era treat them mostly as a fish to be floured and fried whole, so cutting them up and saucing them was a way of dressing a humble fish for a formal table. The word curry itself came into English kitchens through Anglo-Indian households and by 1900 had largely settled into meaning a commercial spice blend stirred into a flour-thickened sauce, several removes from anything cooked on the subcontinent.