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Smelts, Club Style
Split three medium-sized green smelts down the back, clean them and remove the bones, rub them well with olive oil and send to table for the chafing dish. Put into the shallow cutlet dish a tablespoonful of olive oil or butter. When quite hot add the fish, care being used not to allow them to stick to the dish or to break them. Turn once. The fish should be cooked in three minutes.
A chafing-dish breakfast dish meant to be finished at the table in front of the diner. The whole thing hinges on high heat and a very short cook, so the pan must be hot before the fish goes in.
- "Green" smeltsGreen here almost certainly means fresh and uncured rather than unripe or a particular colour; in the fish trade "green" was the usual word for unsalted, uncured fish. Ask for fresh or thawed whole smelts, typically around 4 to 7 inches long.
- Boning a smeltSplit down the back rather than the belly, lift out the backbone with the ribs attached, and leave the fish open and flat. Smelt bones are fine enough that the fish is often eaten whole, bones and all; here the recipe calls for them removed.
- Cutlet dishA shallow round or oval pan set directly over the chafing-dish flame, i.e. used without the hot-water pan beneath it. Any wide, heavy skillet substitutes; a spirit lamp may not bring the pan up to a searing heat, so searing on the stove is an option.
- Three minutes is rightSplit smelts of this size are done in about 90 seconds a side. Longer and they dry out and shred when turned. Turn once only, as written.
- Oil twiceThe fish are rubbed with oil before they reach the table, and more oil or butter goes into the pan. That is deliberate — the coating on the fish is what keeps the flesh from welding to hot metal.
- YieldThe recipe is written for three smelts, plausibly a single serving. Cook in batches rather than crowding the pan, which drops the heat and steams the fish.
- ServingThe recipe specifies no garnish or accompaniment. Lemon, salt and pepper are a reasonable modern choice.
Smelts were a cheap, abundant fish along the North Atlantic in the nineteenth century, running in enormous numbers in spring and sold widely in city markets, which is one reason they turn up in breakfast chapters as readily as among fish courses. "Club style" is often taken to point to the men's clubs of the period, where a chafing dish at the table was part of the performance: the cook, or the diner himself, finished the food over a spirit lamp while everyone watched, though the connection is a plausible reading rather than a documented one. Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in the 1890s and 1900s, with whole books devoted to it, and it favoured exactly this sort of recipe: things that could be done in three minutes over a modest flame with nothing more than fat and heat.