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Fried Smelts, Tomato Sauce
Prepare and fry the same quantity smelts and serve on a hot dish with a folded napkin, with one gill hot tomato sauce in a separate saucebowl in place of the tartare.
This is a variation entry: it assumes the fried smelts recipe immediately preceding it and swaps the cold tartare for hot tomato sauce. A few of its conventions need translating.
- "The same quantity"The figure lives in the preceding recipe, so this line alone gives no yield. A pound or so of smelts is a reasonable modern guess for four as an appetizer, though the count of fish will depend entirely on their size.
- A gillHalf a cup, which is right for four people served alongside rather than napped over the fish. Have the sauce genuinely hot, since the contrast with the hot fried fish is the whole point of the substitution.
- The folded napkinA common convention of the period for serving fried fish: the linen takes up draining fat and keeps the crust from sitting in it. A rack or a bed of paper does the same job if you would rather not oil good linen.
- Frying the smeltsThe method belongs to the preceding recipe, so nothing here specifies the coating or the fat. In modern practice, dredge dry, in flour or flour then egg and crumbs, and fry hot -- around 375F -- only until the crust is set and pale gold. They are small and thin and overcook quickly.
- CleaningSmelts were often gutted through a small slit and cooked whole, heads on, with the fine bones eaten along with the fish, though period instructions are not consistent on the heads.
- SourcingFish sold as "smelt" today is often rainbow smelt, frequently frozen in bulk bags, though the name covers other species depending on the market. Thaw fully and pat very dry before dredging, or the coating will slide off in the fat.
- The saucePeriod tomato sauce here means a smooth reduced sauce, often thickened with a little roux and strained, not a chunky pasta sauce. Keep it thin enough to pour from a bowl.
Smelts were one of the great cheap luxuries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: they run in enormous numbers in spring, they are small enough to fry whole in minutes, and the New England coast supplied city markets in quantity. Hotel and restaurant kitchens of the period fried them in quantity and distinguished the dish mainly by its sauce, and this book prints the tomato version as a two-line variant on the tartare one rather than repeating the method. The folded napkin is a signature of that professional service style, carried into domestic cookbooks as a mark of correctness; it is generally said to have faded by mid-century, along with the habit of eating a whole small fish bones and all.