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Sprats, Fried in Batter
INGREDIENTS for dish for 3 persons.-1 1/2 lb. of sprats, 2 eggs, flour, bread-crumbs; seasoning of salt and pepper to taste. AVERAGE Cost, 6d.
Wipe the sprats, and dip them in a batter made of the above ingredients. Fry of a nice brown, serve very hot, and garnish with fried parsley. Sprats may be baked like herrings.
A page of Victorian shorthand: the "batter" is really an egg-and-crumb coating, and nothing about the frying itself is specified. A few decisions have to be made for you.
- The batter is a breadingBeaten egg, seasoned flour and breadcrumbs used together make a coating, not a pourable batter. Work in the usual order — flour, then egg, then crumbs — and press the crumbs on so they hold in the fat.
- Dry the fish properly"Wipe the sprats" is the hinge of the recipe. Sprats are oily and often sold wet from ice; any surface moisture makes the flour slide and the coating fall away in the pan. Pat them dry on paper and flour them just before frying.
- Fat temperatureNo temperature is given. Use 350-375F. Below that the crumbs soak; above, they colour before the fish is hot through.
- TimingA sprat is 3–5 inches long and takes about 2 minutes a side, or 2–3 minutes total in deep fat. They are done when the crumb is deep gold; longer dries out the flesh, which is the usual fault with small oily fish.
- CleaningThe recipe says nothing about gutting. Sprats have long been cooked whole, ungutted and heads on, and the guts of a fish this small are often eaten. Modern taste generally prefers them gutted and the heads left on or removed to preference; either way, scaling is unnecessary.
- Fried parsleyThe garnish needs bone-dry curly parsley dropped into the same hot fat for 10–15 seconds, until it stops sputtering and turns brilliant green. Wet parsley will spit violently in deep fat.
- "6d."Sixpence in pre-decimal money — a note on how cheap sprats once were, not a modern guide to cost.
- Yield and servingOne pound serves three as the book says only as a small course; count it as a starter for three or a light lunch for two. Serve with lemon, brown bread and butter, and cayenne if you like.
Sprats (Sprattus sprattus, a small relative of the herring) were among the cheapest fish in Britain through the nineteenth century, landed in vast winter quantities in the Thames estuary and off the East Anglian coast and hawked by the bushel in London streets. That is why the entry is so brief and the cost so pointedly noted: sprats were food for households counting pennies, and Mrs Beeton's book — assembled from the 1861 Book of Household Management and reissued in many enlarged forms long after her death in 1865 — treated them as a matter of routine rather than instruction. The closing line, that sprats may be baked like herrings, is characteristic of the book's cross-referencing habit, sending the reader to another entry rather than repeating a method. Sprats also went to the smokehouse, where they were cured and sold as "Norwegian anchovies" or brisling, and the fish remains popular in Scandinavia and the Baltic while it has largely fallen out of British home cooking.