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Smelts Saute, Aux Fines Herbes
Thoroughly wipe twelve good-sized fresh smelts. Have on a plate a tablespoon milk with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; mix well, gently roll the smelts in the seasoning, then in flour. Heat one tablespoon butter in a large frying pan, place the smelts in the pan, one beside another, and gently fry for six minutes on each side. Remove with a skimmer and arrange on a large dish. Sprinkle over half teaspoon chopped chives, a very little chopped chervil and half teaspoon chopped parsley. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon over them. Remove the grease from the pan in which the fish was fried and add half ounce butter; toss the butter in the pan on the fire until well browned, pour over the smelts and serve.
A straightforward pan-fry finished with fines herbes and browned butter. The only thing the original gets badly wrong for modern fish is the cooking time.
- Cut the frying timeSix minutes a side will turn a smelt to dry fiber. Fish of 4-6 inches need about 2-3 minutes a side over medium-high heat, until the flour crust is golden and the flesh at the backbone is opaque.
- More fat than one tablespoonA single tablespoon of butter will not cover a large pan and will scorch before the fish are done. Use 2-3 tablespoons of clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, and fry in two batches rather than crowding.
- The milk dipA tablespoon of milk mixed with the salt and pepper is only meant to dampen the skin so the flour clings. It is not a soak; roll the fish through it and into the flour immediately, and fry at once or the coating turns pasty.
- Cleaning the fishFilippini says only to wipe them, and gives no instruction to gut. Very small smelts were often eaten whole; if yours are not already dressed, slit and gut them. Heads and tails are commonly left on, and the bones are soft enough to eat.
- Fines herbesChives, chervil and parsley here, chopped fine and added raw off the heat so they keep their color. Chervil is the hard one to find fresh; a little tarragon is the usual stand-in, used sparingly.
- The browned butterHalf an ounce is one tablespoon. Pour off the frying fat, wipe the pan if any flour has burned, then cook the fresh butter until the milk solids go hazelnut brown and it smells nutty. Take it off before it darkens further and pour it over immediately.
- Order of finishingHerbs, then lemon, then the hot butter last, so the butter hits the plate still foaming. Serve at once; smelts go cold and limp quickly.
- YieldTwelve good-sized smelts serve two as a main course, or four as a first course.
Smelts were a cheap, seasonal glut fish when The International Cook Book appeared in 1906, compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York. Smelt ran in large spring shoals along the northeastern coast and were sold cheaply to be fried whole, bones included, which is why the recipe assumes no filleting and no fussing. The treatment itself is straight French bourgeois cooking: aux fines herbes means the classic quartet of parsley, chives, chervil and tarragon, added raw at the end, and the browned butter poured over is beurre noisette, a common finish for small fried fish in restaurant kitchens of the period. Filippini's book ranges through national styles, but its default idiom is the Franco-American cooking of the great New York hotels, and this dish is a good example of it: two minutes' worth of technique, applied to a fish nobody thought was grand.