Home › The Principles of Cookery › PLAICE (a la Richmond)
PLAICE (a la Richmond)
Take a large plaice, fillet and cut it into small strips the size of whitebait; dry them well in a floured cloth, season with pepper and salt, put into a wire frying basket and plunge into boiling fat for two minutes, not longer. Pile high on a dish, and send a cut lemon and thin slices of brown bread and butter to table.
A whitebait-style treatment for a cheap flatfish: the whole point is very thin strips, very dry, very hot fat, and a very short fry.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means deep fat hot enough to seize the surface at once; in modern terms somewhere around 360-375F. Much cooler than that and the strips absorb oil and slump instead of crisping.
- Two minutes means two minutesPlaice fillet cut whitebait-thin is cooked through in well under that. Any longer and the strips shrink to dry threads; the timing in the original is deliberate and should be respected.
- Drying in a floured clothToss the strips in a clean cloth dusted with flour rather than dredging them. It blots surface moisture and leaves only a whisper of coating, which is what keeps them separate in the basket.
- Size of the stripsWhitebait are small, roughly 2 inches long and slender, so cut the fillets into narrow strips of about that length and no more than half an inch wide. Uneven strips cook unevenly.
- Fry in batchesLoading the basket cools the fat and steams the fish. Do a handful at a time and let the fat come back to heat between batches; the strips are eaten as fast as they are made.
- A large plaiceA fish of about 2 lb yields four fillets and roughly 12 oz of trimmed flesh, enough for four as a first course. Ask for it filleted and skinned if you would rather not do it.
- ServingBrown bread and butter here means thin-sliced wholemeal, buttered and cut into fingers, the standard accompaniment to whitebait. Cayenne alongside the lemon is traditional and not out of place.
Whitebait dinners were a fixture of Victorian London, eaten at the riverside taverns of Greenwich and Blackwall, where the tiny fish were netted from the Thames and fried the moment they landed; the annual Ministerial whitebait dinner at Greenwich was a well-known parliamentary ritual of the period. Strips of a cheap flatfish, floured and flash-fried, gave the same crisp mouthful with lemon and brown bread and butter. "A la Richmond" may point to the Thames-side resort upstream, where riverside hotels served fish dinners to day-trippers, though the origin of the name is uncertain and the connection no more than a guess.