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Horly of Smelts
Cut the heads off twelve good-sized, fresh smelts, then split in two through back, remove spinal bones and place them on a dish. Season with a light teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika, juice of a lemon and one tablespoon oil, turn them well in the seasoning, then let infuse for fifteen minutes. Prepare a batter for fritters, drop smelts in, roll them well, then drop one by one in boiling fat and fry for ten minutes, turning with the skimmer once in a while. Lift up, drain on a cloth, dress on a hot dish with folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens, and serve with one gill of hot tomato sauce separately.
A straightforward marinated-and-battered fish fry, with one timing that needs correcting and a French name that has been mangled in transcription.
- Ten minutes is far too longA split, boned smelt is a few millimetres thick and cooks through in about two minutes at 350-375F. Ten minutes gives you a dry splinter of fish inside a burnt shell. Fry until the batter is set and pale gold, then lift.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means fat shimmering at roughly 350-375F, not literally boiling. Below that the batter absorbs oil; much above it and the coating colours before the fish is hot. Fry in two or three batches so the temperature does not crash.
- A gillHalf a cup, so about 120 ml of tomato sauce for twelve smelts. Served separately in a small sauceboat, not poured over, which would soften the batter.
- The marinadeFifteen minutes in salt, paprika, lemon and oil is the whole point of the dish, and it is enough. Left longer, the lemon juice starts to firm and whiten the flesh, and delicate smelt turns chalky.
- Fritter batterThe book assumes you know one: flour, egg, and enough beer, milk or water to make a coating the thickness of heavy cream. Let it rest twenty minutes. Pat the smelts dry of marinade before dipping or the batter slides off.
- Buying and boning smeltsWhole smelts commonly run roughly 4-8 inches, and the recipe asks for good-sized ones. Splitting through the back and lifting out the spine is easier if the fish are very cold. Some fishmongers sell them already butterflied; the tiny pin bones that remain soften in frying and are eaten.
- The folded napkinA period service convention: a linen napkin folded on the platter to absorb residual fat and keep the fry crisp. A rack over a warm tray does the same job without the period staging.
- YieldTwelve smelts serve three or four as a first course, two as a main with the tomato sauce and bread.
"Horly" is a transcription of Orly — the French garnish à l'Orly, in which fish fillets are marinated in oil, lemon and seasoning, coated in frying batter, deep-fried, piled on a napkin with fried parsley, and sent out with tomato sauce apart. It was one of the fixed formulas of nineteenth-century restaurant cooking, applied most often to sole but freely to whiting, perch and, as here, smelts. The origin of the name is disputed and generally treated as unsettled; it is variously linked to the Paris-region place name and to a cook's surname, with no firm documentation behind either. Smelts were an obvious candidate because they were cheap and abundant along both the European and North American coasts, arriving at market in spring runs by the barrel — a small oily fish that fries well and needs little more than boning and heat. That an American compilation like this one reproduces the Orly treatment intact, napkin and all, shows how thoroughly French restaurant vocabulary had settled into English-language cookbooks by the early twentieth century, even when the spelling did not survive the trip.