On Sun, 27 Jan 2013 14:51:43 -0000, "Ophelia"
> wrote:

>My family were great bakers and made wonderful bread, cakes, scones and
>pastries every week.
>
>A couple of my favourites which I still sometimes make today:
>snip
>What were your favourites? Not necessarily sweet thing btw!
>
I loved fried smelt. Great Lakes smelt are smaller than ocean smelt.
My BIL would catch them by the bushel-basket full in Lake Michigan. I
can't remember the time of year or what else we had with them. I
think we had sour cream cucumbers, but what I remember is this truly
heaping platter of fried smelt. (Heaped high enough that some would
always slide off) They were all golden and crusty. Mom fried them in
her big 'spider.' (I don't know why, but spider is/was a common term
for the big, black, cast iron skillet.) Since they are small, you
simply gutted them and took the heads off. Everything else got eaten.
We'd have the smelt for several days because we had a huge amount of
them, but I didn't mind. I just loved that time of year. I've since
had ocean smelt, but they are big enough to be "fish." and I didn't
enjoy them near as much.
Janet US