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Smelts, Toulouse
Neatly wipe twelve good-sized, fresh smelts, place them in a sautoire with half ounce butter and a light gill white wine. Season with a half teaspoon salt and cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper; boil for three minutes, then set in the oven for twenty minutes, remove and keep hot. Mix in a saucepan one tablespoon melted butter with one and a half tablespoons flour, stir and heat for a half minute. Pour the fish liquor into this pan with a gill of cream and a half gill milk. Season with a saltspoon each cayenne pepper and grated nutmeg. Add six sliced, canned mushrooms, six very thin slices truffles and twelve round fish quenelles; lightly mix and let gently boil for five minutes, pour in a tablespoon sherry, mix a little, dress the smelts on a hot dish, pour the sauce over and serve.
A Delmonico's-style fish course built on a classic French garnish. The sauce does most of the work; the smelts need far less time than the original allows.
- The oven time is the problemSmelts are small, thin fish that cook through in a few minutes. Three minutes of simmering plus twenty in the oven will reduce them to dry threads on the bone. Bring the wine and butter to a bare simmer, cover with the buttered paper, and give them 5 to 8 minutes total in a 350F oven, until the flesh at the backbone is just opaque.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz); a "light gill" means a scant one. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A full quarter teaspoon each of cayenne and nutmeg will dominate a sauce of this size, so start with a pinch of each and correct at the end.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wide enough to hold the twelve fish in one layer without crowding. The buttered paper laid directly on them is a cartouche, which keeps the exposed tops from drying while the shallow liquid does the cooking.
- The smelts themselvesBuy them whole, gutted, heads on or off as you prefer; rainbow smelt sold frozen are the usual article. Twelve good-sized fish is four servings as a course, two as a main dish. Wipe rather than wash them, as the original says, so the skin holds together.
- QuenellesSmall poached dumplings of pounded pike, whiting or veal bound with panade and cream. They are not sold in most shops; make them from a current recipe, or substitute small poached fish dumplings or bay scallops. The twelve are garnish, one to each smelt.
- Truffles and canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms of the period meant small preserved button mushrooms, firmer and saltier than fresh. Fresh cremini, sliced and sweated in butter first, do the job. Truffle is optional at current prices; a few shavings of preserved truffle or nothing at all will not break the sauce.
- Building the sauceButter and flour cooked half a minute is a white roux; keep it pale. Strain the fish liquor in before the cream and milk so no bones or skin end up in the sauce, and add the sherry off the boil at the very end, or its aroma cooks away.
- PlatingArrange the smelts head to tail on a warmed platter and nap them with the sauce, keeping the quenelles and mushrooms visible on top. The sauce should coat a spoon but still flow; loosen with a spoonful of milk if it has tightened while the fish rested.
Toulouse here is not a place of origin but a classical French garniture: quenelles, mushrooms and truffles bound in a pale cream or velouté sauce, a combination codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens and, by a tradition that is not documented, said to take its name from the Comte de Toulouse. It was applied indifferently to poultry, sweetbreads, vol-au-vent fillings and, as here, to fish, and its appearance in an American cookbook signals the fully Francophone haute cuisine of the great New York restaurants. Smelts were the natural carrier: cheap, abundant in Atlantic and Great Lakes waters, and small enough to serve whole, they gave a kitchen a way to present an expensive garnish on an inexpensive fish. The instruction to use canned mushrooms rather than fresh is its own period detail, from a time when tinned button mushrooms were readily at hand in professional kitchens.