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October 15
Menu: Broiled Smelts; Roasted Squabs; Oyster Plant, Italian Style; Oriental Salad; Sweet Cider Jelly; Coffee Broiled Smelts-Select 12 large smelts, clean well and split. Chop 12 olives, 1½ green pepper with seeds removed, 2 sprigs parsley, add 1/2 tablespoon Crisco. Spread paste inside each smelt. Close fish together, sprinkle with salt, moisten with melted Crisco and broil over clear fire.
A short, workable broiled-fish recipe from Crisco's promotional cookbook. The trailing line about poêléed fowl and cranberry sauce is the heading of the next day's menu in the calendar, not part of this dish.
- The smeltsSmelts sold at market typically run about 4 to 8 inches; "large" here simply means the bigger end of whatever the fishmonger has. Split means butterflied along the belly and opened flat, backbone removed or left in as you prefer, since smelt bones are soft and edible.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold under the same name though reformulated over the years to cut trans fats. Melted butter or olive oil does the same job here and tastes better with olives and green pepper.
- The stuffingChop the olives, pepper and parsley fine enough to make a coarse paste; the half tablespoon of fat is only there to bind it. Spread it thinly rather than overloading the fish.
- "Broil over clear fire"A clear fire is coals burned down past the flame stage, with no smoke. A gas or electric broiler at its highest setting, with the fish about four inches from the element, is the modern equivalent.
- TimingThe recipe gives none. Split smelts need roughly 2-3 minutes per side; they are done when the flesh turns opaque and the skin blisters. Longer and they dry to cotton.
- Keeping them closedPress the halves back together and secure each fish with a wooden pick or lay them tightly in a hinged grill basket, or the filling escapes into the fire the moment the fat renders.
- Green pepperIn 1913 this almost certainly means a sweet bell pepper rather than a chile. The recipe directs that the seeds be removed.
- YieldTwelve smelts serve three or four as a main course, six as a first course.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco went on sale, and it exists to demonstrate that a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening could stand in for butter, lard and suet in every corner of the kitchen. That accounts for the half tablespoon of Crisco worked into an olive-and-pepper paste, where an earlier cook would simply have used butter and thought nothing of it. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a full menu for every day of the year, so that the product turned up on the table daily rather than occasionally. Smelts were a sensible choice for an autumn menu: small, oily, caught in quantity along the Atlantic coast, and cheap enough in season that a dozen was an unremarkable purchase. They were commonly fried whole in deep fat, so broiling them split and stuffed reads as the slightly dressier treatment a hostess might want for a company dinner.