NOVEMBER 197 



XL, VIII 



One mild November morning I enjoyed the best dish 

 that 1 can recollect ever to have eaten at 



, ,, . The Smelt 



breakfast. It was in an excellent little hotel 

 in Creetown. We had been down to the tidal estuary 

 before sunrise to watch the net drawn for smelts (or 

 sparlings, as we call that pretty fish in Scotland), and 

 we carried some of them up to the hotel and had them 

 piping hot on the table before they had been half an 

 hour out of the water. Little may townsfolk under- 

 stand the delicacy of that fare, for smelts are more 

 perishable than almost any other British fish, and a 

 few hours suffice to dissipate their peculiar aroma. 

 Moreover, owing to the ease with which these fragile 

 little fish become impregnated with the odour of any 

 substance with which they lie in contact, when served 

 on a London dinner-table they are usually flavoured 

 from the wooden cases wherein they have travelled 

 from British or Dutch estuaries. No one, therefore, 

 can have a notion of the subtle toothsomeness of the 

 smelt who has not treated it as we did ours on that 

 far-off morning at Creetown. 



Our Scottish name ' sparling ' is a variant of the 

 French eperlan, and has an advantage over the English 

 ' smelt ' in not being liable to confusion with the 

 ' smolt,' or young of the salmon. The name ' smelt ' 

 has been erroneously explained as referring to the 

 peculiar odour or smell perceptible when a shoal of 

 these fish is hauled ashore, and Artedi (1705-35) 

 must have had this meaning in view when he fixed the 



