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Smelts, Africaine
Thoroughly wipe twelve good-sized, fresh smelts, place in a sautoir with half ounce butter, one and a half gills pure tomato juice, two sweet red peppers cut in small squares and half teaspoon French mustard. Season with a teaspoon salt, cover the fish with buttered paper and set in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, lift up the smelts with a skimmer and dress on a hot dish. Mix on a saucer a teaspoon butter and teaspoon flour and gradually add to the sauce, gently mixing while adding, then boil for two minutes. Pour the sauce over the smelts and serve.
A short braise in tomato and sweet pepper, finished with a flour-and-butter paste. Almost everything here works as written; the timing and the oven temperature are the two things the original leaves you to guess.
- The hinge: don't overbakeTwenty minutes is long for smelts, which are small enough to cook through in 8 to 12 minutes depending on size. Check at ten: the flesh should just come away from the backbone and still look glossy, not chalky.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature at all, simply 'set in the oven.' A moderate oven, around 350F, suits this kind of covered braise; the liquid should barely tremble, not bubble hard.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of tomato juice is about 6 fl oz, or three-quarters of a cup. That is enough to come partway up the fish, not to submerge them.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan or shallow flameproof braiser. It needs to be ovenproof and wide enough to hold twelve smelts in one layer, and you finish the sauce in the same pan on the stovetop.
- Buttered paperA cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the underside and laid directly on the fish. It traps steam while letting a little liquid reduce, which a tight lid will not do.
- Sweet red peppersRed bell pepper cut in small dice, or drained canned pimiento for a softer, sweeter result. They will not fully soften in ten minutes, so cut them small.
- French mustardDijon. Half a teaspoon is a seasoning here, not a flavor note you should be able to name in the finished sauce.
- Thickening the sauceEqual butter and flour worked cold on a saucer is a beurre manié. Add it in small pinches to the simmering liquid, whisking each in before the next, then give it the full two minutes so the raw flour taste cooks out.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; twelve smelts would serve roughly three as a main course or four as a first course. Serve the fish whole; small smelts are often eaten bones and all, while larger ones are usually gutted first.
"À l'africaine" in the classical French kitchen is a garnish label rather than a geographic claim: it signals tomato and sweet peppers, sometimes with eggplant or a touch of mustard or paprika, a shorthand for a warm-climate combination. Filippini's International Cook Book is often cited as collecting hundreds of such names, though the label alone does not explain how a small New England and northern European fish turns up under an African dressing. Smelts were cheap and abundant then, sold by the pound in eastern American markets during their spring runs, and cookbooks of the era treat them as a workaday fish that could be dignified with a French name and a sauce.