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Whiting, Fried, Economical
Empty, cleanse, scrape, and wipe the whiting without skinning them, and score them on each side to the depth of a quarter of an inch with a sharp knife. Dip the fish in milk, flour it well, and fry it in fat till crisp and lightly browned. Drain it, serve on a hot dish covered with a napkin, and send anchovy, shrimp, or ravigote sauce to table with it. Time, about six minutes to fry the fish.
A plain fried fish, economical because it skips the egg-and-breadcrumb coating and the skinning that dressier Victorian whiting recipes demanded. The points below cover the vocabulary and the few places the method needs translating.
- Scoring is the hingeThe quarter-inch cuts on each side let heat into a round-bodied fish quickly and help stop the skin contracting and buckling in the pan. The recipe fixes the depth at a quarter of an inch but says nothing about how many cuts or at what angle; without scoring the fish is more likely to curl, and the thick shoulder may still be underdone at six minutes.
- "Empty" and "scrape"Gut the fish and scrape off the scales. Whiting scales are fine and come away easily under the back of a knife, worked tail to head, but the skin is left on here, so they must go.
- Which whitingThe book means Merlangius merlangus, the small European cod-family fish, usually sold whole and modest in size. In the United States "whiting" usually means silver hake, which behaves much the same in a pan. Small haddock, pollock or hake are fair substitutes.
- Milk and flour, not batterThe milk is only there to wet the surface so the flour clings. Flour generously, then shake the fish so the coating is thin and even; loose flour burns in the fat and blackens it.
- The fat and its heat"Fry in fat" here means dripping or oil in an unstated quantity; the recipe specifies neither depth nor temperature. The six minutes suits a fish of this size in fat that is properly hot; in fat that is not hot enough the flour coating soaks rather than crisps.
- The napkinServing on a folded napkin was standard for fried fish and did a real job, absorbing steam so the underside stayed crisp between kitchen and table. A rack over a warm dish achieves the same thing without the laundry.
- Ravigote sauceA green herb sauce, either a warm velouté finished with chopped chervil, chives and tarragon, or a cold vinaigrette version with capers and shallot. Anchovy and shrimp sauces are both butter-and-flour sauces of the period; any sharp, salty sauce serves the same purpose.
- YieldOne whole whiting per person, two for a large appetite. Allow a little more if you are buying the larger silver hake.
Whiting was the cheap, delicate, thoroughly respectable fish of Victorian Britain: soft-fleshed, mild, easy to digest, and regularly prescribed for invalids and children alongside sole. The showy way to serve it was skinned and curled with its tail through its mouth, egged and crumbed, sometimes called whiting en colère; this version leaves the skin on and uses milk and flour instead of egg and breadcrumbs, which may be part of what lies behind its description as "economical," saving the eggs, the crumbs and the labour of skinning. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was compiled for a broad late-nineteenth-century household readership. The three suggested sauces show the same logic in reverse: a lean fish with little fat of its own was expected to arrive with something rich or sharp beside it, and anchovy sauce in particular turns up with fried white fish throughout British cookery of the period.