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Whitebait, Mock
Take cooked or uncooked white fish of any kind; uncooked fish is, of course, the best. Divide it into strips an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide. Dip these into frying batter, put them into a wire frying-basket, and plunge them into very hot fat. Let them remain till they are lightly browned. Drain them, pile on a hot dish, and serve with cayenne, quarters of lemons, and thin brown bread and butter. The frying batter may be made by beating together briskly and thoroughly a table-spoonful of flour, a pinch of salt, two table-spoonfuls of milk, and one egg. Flour varies in quality, so that some kinds require more liquid than others. The batter, however, should be a little thicker than cream. Time to fry the fish, four to five minutes. WHITE BECHAMEL SAUCE, COLD (to mask boiled Poultry, Turbot, etc. which is to be served cold).
Make the bechamel of nicely-flavoured white stock, so strong that it will jelly when cold. A spoonful of gelatine dissolved in a little white stock will answer the purpose if jellied stock is not at hand. Mix with it when hot an equal quantity of milk or cream, strain it into a basin, thicken with arrowroot, and when cold it will be fit for use. It should be thick enough to adhere to the bird, etc. which it is to mask.
A frugal imitation of the Greenwich whitebait dinner, made with strips of cheap white fish instead of the whole tiny fish. The two things worth attending to are the size of the strips and how briefly they need to be in the fat.
- Ignore the stated frying timeStrips an inch long and a quarter-inch wide, in fat hot enough to brown batter, are done in 60 to 90 seconds. Four to five minutes will give you dark batter and dry, shrunken fish; that timing suits a thicker fillet, not these slivers.
- Fat temperature"Very hot fat" is not defined in the book; for battered fish it is usually taken to be somewhere around 360-375F. Below that the batter absorbs oil and slides; much above it and the outside colours before the fish is set. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Which fishAny firm skinless white fish works: cod, haddock, pollock, hake, whiting. Cut across the grain of the fillet so the strips hold together. The recipe's tolerance of leftover cooked fish is a thrift measure; cooked flakes tend to break up in the basket, so raw really is better here.
- Batter quantityOne tablespoon flour, two of milk and one egg makes only about a third of a cup of batter, enough to coat roughly 6 to 8 oz of fish. Multiply by three or four for a dish for four people. "A little thicker than cream" is the right target: it should coat a strip and drip off slowly.
- Wire basketA basket is used because the pieces are small enough to fall through a spider, but batter sticks to mesh. Lower the empty basket into the fat first so it is hot, then add the coated strips a few at a time, or simply drop them straight into the pan and lift them out with a slotted spoon.
- The accompanimentsCayenne, lemon quarters and thin brown bread and butter are the fixed table setting for whitebait and are the point of the imitation. Serve as a first course or savoury, not as a main dish.
- A second recipe has run onEverything from "WHITE BECHAMEL SAUCE, COLD" is a separate dictionary entry that has been set continuously with the first. It is a chaud-froid-style coating sauce for cold poultry or turbot, unrelated to the fried fish.
Whitebait are not a species but the fry of sprats, herring and related fish, taken in estuaries and eaten whole, and in the nineteenth century they were bound up with the Thames: the fishery below London supplied the taverns at Greenwich and Blackwall, where the annual ministerial whitebait dinner was a fixture of the parliamentary calendar. The dish's ritual accompaniments -- cayenne, lemon, thin brown bread and butter -- were as fixed as the fish itself, which is why a mock version could be recognised at all. Thames whitebait had by then become scarcer and dearer, the river's fouling being commonly blamed, and a mock version offered the effect at less cost. The recipe belongs to a large Victorian family of "mock" dishes -- mock turtle, mock crab, mock goose -- in which the name records an aspiration rather than an ingredient.