Smelts in Your Mouth

Smelts! was the subject line of the email I received from my brother-in-law Dave. Since early January, he'd had a standing order for two pounds of smelts at Saunders Fish Market in Portsmouth. Now, our ship had come in, so to speak.

According to the guys at Saunders, not only had the smelts just arrived that morning, but they'd still been swimming in Great Bay the day before. As the locals tell it, smelt fishing in Great Bay is quite an adventure. First, you've got to wait for the ice to form in order for the fishing to even be possible. Then, because Great Bay is a tidal estuary, you can find yourself riding the ice as it goes up and down with the tide. At high tide, you can be as much as 7 feet above the bottom; at low, you can be sitting right on the mud.

We'd first had smelts last year, when our friend Garen Heller, the farmer who provides Garen's greens to Seacoast-area restaurants and farmers' markets, brought some as a "hostess" gift to one of our dinner parties. We watched as he dredged them in flour and cornmeal, and then fried them up in our Tefal deep fryer. While smelts are an oily, briney fish, like sardines, if they are cooked soon after they leave the water, they taste light and sweet. These did, and we decided that smelts should be part of our winter feasting every year.

When Dave picked up our smelts, they were cleaned, gutted, and ready to go. While smelts can also be baked or pan fried, we wanted that incomparable combination of crisp and sweet than can only deep frying can give.  We dipped them in corn flour seasoned with a healthy amount of Aleppo pepper to add some zip.  When the fish were ready for frying, we set up the Tefal on the front porch. (The weather was quite mild, and that way we wouldn't have that fried-food smell in the house all weekend.) Meanwhile, Robin and I prepared some homemade tartar sauce.

Dave waited until the oil reach 375 degrees. Then he fried the smelts until they were just golden brown -- about 5 to 7 minutes. When they were all cooked, we dived in. If the fish are small enough, you can eat the whole thing. Ours were a little too big for that, but it was easy to remove the bones. Ahh, and the taste -- melt-in-your-mouth good. We gave a nod of thanks to fish and fishermen and promptly ate them all!