"Janet Bostwick" > wrote in message
...
> 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.

I had heard of them but didn't really know what they were and had to look
them up Do you ever cook those these days?
I think food from our childhood brings back so many memories
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