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Smelts, Merion
Split through front twelve good-sized, fresh smelts without separating, remove spinal bones and cut off heads and tails. Season all over with a light teaspoon salt, a half teaspoon pepper and two saltspoons curry powder, lightly dip in cold milk, then roll in a little cornmeal flour. Thoroughly heat one tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, add half a finely chopped onion and gently brown for two minutes, tossing a little meanwhile. Place in the smelts one beside another and fry for three minutes on each side, then set in oven for five minutes, remove and dress on a hot dish. Squeeze over the juice of half a sound lemon and sprinkle with a half tablespoon capers and half teaspoon chopped tarragon leaves. Remove all butter and onions from pan, add an ounce fresh butter and tablespoon bread crumbs, toss on fire until a light brown, then pour it over smelts and serve.
A straightforward pan-fried smelt with a brown-butter-and-crumb finish. The whole dish takes under fifteen minutes, and the only real risk is overcooking.
- The hinge: keep the times shortThree minutes per side is right for smelts of 5-6 inches, and the five minutes in the oven finishes them through. If your smelts are already opaque through, skip it rather than drying them out.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of curry powder is half a teaspoon. The seasoning as written is assertive but not excessive across twelve fish.
- "Split through front without separating"Butterfly the fish along the belly and open it flat, leaving the two halves joined along the back. Pull out the backbone with your fingers; in a smelt it lifts away almost whole, and the small pin bones can be left in and eaten.
- Cornmeal flourThis means finely ground cornmeal, closer to a corn flour than to modern medium-grind polenta meal. Fine yellow cornmeal works; anything coarse will fall off the milk-dampened fish and burn in the pan.
- Pan butterOne tablespoon of butter for twelve fish is a thin film and will scorch under the onion. Use two or three, or add a spoonful of neutral oil to raise the smoke point, and keep the heat at medium so the onion browns rather than blackens.
- The finishing butterAn ounce of butter is two tablespoons. Wipe the pan clean before adding it, or the burnt cornmeal from frying will muddy the sauce. Toss the crumbs in the foaming butter only until they turn light hazelnut brown, then pour immediately -- butter goes from brown to bitter in seconds.
- YieldTwelve good-sized smelts serve three as a main course or four to six as a first course. Serve at once; the crumbs soften within a few minutes.
Smelts were among the cheapest and most abundant fish on American tables when this book appeared: small, oily, anadromous fish that ran up coastal rivers in vast numbers each spring and were sold by the dozen or the pound, usually fried whole. The treatment here -- flour or meal, hot butter, lemon, capers, and a separate brown butter poured over at the last moment -- is the classic French meuni he dash of curry powder reflects the freedom with which turn-of-the-century restaurant kitchens used curry as a seasoning rather than as the basis of a curry. The book itself never explains the name "Merion." What distinguishes the recipe from a plain fried smelt is the discipline of the finish: the frying fat is discarded, and fresh butter and crumbs are browned clean, a small piece of professional technique carried over into a domestic cookbook.