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Fried Smelts, Remoulade Sauce
Thoroughly wipe twelve good-sized, fresh smelts, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, lightly roll in flour, dip in beaten egg, roll in bread crumbs, then fry in boiling fat for ten minutes. Take up, drain well, dress on hot dish with a folded napkin, decorate with six quarters lemon and serve with a remoulade sauce separately.
A straightforward breaded fry, but the stated cooking time belongs to a different fish. Smelts are small, thin and almost entirely done by the time the crumbs colour.
- The timing is the hingeTen minutes will leave you with dry fish inside a dark crust. Smelts of finger length need about two to three minutes total in fat at 350-375F, until the coating is deep gold; work in batches so the fat does not drop below temperature.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil at frying temperatures; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when the fish goes in, roughly 350-375F. The recipe does not specify the fat or its depth; lard or a neutral oil, deep enough to float the fish, suits the method.
- Buying and cleaningSmelts are traditionally fried whole, heads on, and are often sold that way. They can be gutted through a small slit and the head snipped off if preferred; the backbone is fine enough to eat.
- Seasoning the fish, not the flourA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for twelve fish is applied directly, before flouring. Season the crumbs lightly as well if you like, since much of the first seasoning ends up in the flour dish.
- The crumbsIn period cookery "bread crumbs" generally meant dried, sifted crumbs from stale bread, fine and sandy rather than the coarse fresh crumb. Panko fries crisper but gives a much rougher surface.
- RemouladeNo formula is given on this page. A remoulade of the period is mayonnaise sharpened with mustard, chopped capers, gherkins, parsley, tarragon or chervil, and often anchovy; make it well ahead so it is cold against the hot fish.
- The folded napkinDressing fried fish on a folded linen napkin on the platter was standard restaurant practice: the cloth absorbs draining fat and keeps the crust from steaming. A rack over a warm dish does the same job if you would rather not launder it.
- YieldTwelve smelts with lemon and sauce is a first course for four, or a light main course for two.
Smelts are small silvery fish of the genus Osmerus and its relatives, taken in vast numbers in spring runs on the North Atlantic coast, and cheap enough in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to appear constantly on hotel menus and in Lenten cookery. Fresh ones are said to smell faintly of cucumber, often said to be the old test of quality. The treatment here — flour, egg, crumbs, deep fat, lemon quarters, a folded napkin, a cold sauce passed separately — is the standard French restaurant handling of small fried fish as it reached American hotel kitchens, and remoulade, a mustard-and-caper mayonnaise generally traced to eighteenth-century French cookery, was the usual partner.