By Ron Schmidt
Ever since my move to Northern Michigan from the Albion area 37 years ago, I have looked forward each spring to a good smelt dinner at Art’s Tavern in Glen Arbor, Michigan. Whenever my brother, who also loves them, comes to visit me, we make a point of going to Art’s to order plates of the tasty little fish and a cold beer for each of us. I like finger foods, and smelt are ideal for eating that way. The bones are small and so soft after cooking that each fish can be eaten whole. You never have to worry about getting a bone stuck in your throat as you do with bigger fish.
While we’ve dined on smelt, my brother and I have talked about how, as kids, we would load empty 10-gallon milk cans in the bed of our pickup truck and head to northern Michigan or Saginaw Bay creeks. This was late April or May when the smelt would be running upstream. We grew up working on a farm, and it was always nighttime when we headed out, after all the farm chores were done for the day. We made a full night of it, driving there and back and spending a couple of hours smelt dipping with our nets. Sometimes we would fill one or two 10-gallon cans, and other times we would be lucky to get a gallon or two, but it was always great fun.
We looked forward to eating them dipped in flour and fried for our lunch and supper the next few days. If we were lucky and caught them by the milk can, we would freeze them and be able to eat smelt until the next spring. We have not been able to do that the last 30 years as it has become harder to find schools of smelt running up streams, and we stopped trying.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services announced in January that rainbow smelt from some Michigan lakes⸺including Lake Michigan⸺contain PFAS, dubbed “forever chemicals.” Since these contaminants can build up in our bodies and cause cancer, the MDHHS recommends that we should not eat them from Lake Michigan more than once a month. I will eat them once a year, just to be safe. Besides, that’s about how often my brother visits me these days, and we can enjoy that smelt dinner together and reminisce about the good old smelt-dipping days.
Enjoy them at your favorite tavern, but not too often.
Michigan’s Eat Safe Fish Guides can be found here.
A children’s author, Ron Schmidt lives in the north woods with his Leader Dog, Lila. He enjoys long walks, listening to birds and folk singers and bands, and visiting a popular nearby destination for his favorite wine and mead.
