Smelt: A tiny, sardine-like fish

The Smelt was the worst. Of all the questionable (I'm being polite) meals my Mother prepared, this one far surpassed any of the others for it's inherent inedible-ness.
I remember this meal because it was also the most egregious departure from the succulent feast that we had been told it would be.

The grocery store that we always went to was on the corner of Middlebelt and 10 Mile Road in Farmington Hills. Great Scott!! (The two '!!' marks were actually a part of the name.) It was a grimy, tired neighborhood store with dirty tile and Styrofoam blue ice bins that smelled like mildew. The aisles were crowded, dim and a minefield of boxes waiting to be shelved. My Mom loved this store. She always said she liked her grocery stores small and dirty. Why would you want your family's meals to come from the infested store instead of the clean one? I'm sure there's a wealth of information there for some very bored psychologist.
I liked the A&P in town. It was clean, bright and smelled like bread and coffee. There were stock boys who actually straightened the shelves. But we stopped going there so often after the manager got shot inside the store. If I remember correctly - he died.

The smelts were packaged in a blue Styrofoam butcher tray, stretch-wrapped and tagged with a price tag - their silvery bodies smashed and folded to fit the container. Untrimmed, uncleaned fishes - fins tucked everywhere, eyeballs glaring and dripping their last. My mother was instantly elated when she saw them. You'd have thought she had found salvation right there in the cold case. My thoughts leaned more toward the, "Define 'good'" but I left them as thoughts. I still trusted her.
When we got home we prepared to make smelt. She told me it would be time consuming, but worth every effort. Again, I believed her.

Of course I got the job of cleaning the fish. I stood there in front of the big enamel sink slitting bellies and watching fish guts slip down the drain. My hands were small so manipulating the tiny bodies was easy, but I hated it. When my grandfather and I fished, I always left when it came time to kill and clean the fish - sad and disgusting. I've never been a good at being a carnivore.
Once the fishes were washed, my mother took them and breaded them in some concoction of moist starchy glob and threw them en masse into her prized Wagner frying pan. In retrospect, it was at this point in the cooking process where the whole meal literally should have and figuratively did go to the dogs.

My Mother has always been a lazy cook. Actually a reluctant participant in raising her family might be a better albeit broader description. She made dinner and everything else when she was ready and according to her schedule, not when it was appropriate or necessary. If she had time to make fried chicken at 2pm - she did. Then she let it sit in the grease at a temperature just warm enough to keep it from poisoning us all later (who wants to take care of a bunch of whiny, puking kids all night long?). Dinner was around 5:30pm. That chicken had three and a half hours to sit there, soak up grease and burn on the one side that maintained contact with the pan. It was yummy! Not!
Most of her dishes were that way, but some weren't impaired by her style (think Spaghetti sauce).
Just imagine what happens when you apply this technique to smelt. In case you can't, here's what happened.

The smelt, instead of becoming the crispy, delicate, ivory pieces of succulence that we were informed would appear, they were a massacred heap of lifeless, grease-laden corpses in varying states of deterioration and degradation. They had been cooked too long, too roughly, too together and too carelessly to ever be catapulted to the culinary delight they were so famously prepared for. Instead of eating, we worked - painstakingly maneuvering around needle-like bones, skin, heads and Crisco to get at the tiniest pieces of edible flesh.

I don't remember what else we had with them that night. Probably Jell-O, that would have been typical. Something that melted, ran into and crept under the fishes adding high-fructose-sweet, fruit, bitter-red-dye flavors and a warm syrup texture to the car wreck of tastes already in your mouth. The fish would achieve an entire new level of gross-ness with Jell-O. But never just plain, unadulterated Jell-O. I remember begging, pleading for plain Jell-O as a kid. Instead, and like most foods, it was altered as a condition of it's entry into the house. It had to be improved. It "needed something". She needed something.
The Smelt was definitely the worst example of a meal I can remember - and there were so many to choose from. Many close seconds.
I grew up believing that there had to be a better way.
This couldn't be how food was meant to be. It just couldn't.