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Whitebait, Devilled
INGREDIENTS for dish for 3 or 4 persons.-1 pint of whitebait, some flour, lard for frying, salt, cayenne. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 6d.
Put some flour in a cloth and shake the whitebait in this; then get rid of the superfluous flour by putting them in a sieve and shaking well. Have ready a pan of boiling lard, into which put them in a frying basket. Fry and drain as in preceding recipe, but in addition to the salt, add a full seasoning of cayenne. Serve as hot as possible with cut lemon and very thin slices of brown bread and butter. The dryer and crisper the whitebait is when fried the better.
TIME.-About 3 minutes.
SEASONABLE from April to August.
White Sauce. (Good.) - INGREDIENTS for sauce for a pair of fowls or a turkey. pint of white stock, pint of cream, 1 dessertspoonful of flour, salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Have ready a delicately-clean saucepan, into which put the stock, which should be well flavoured with vegetables, and rather savoury; mix the flour smoothly with the cream, add it to the stock, season with a little salt, and boil all these ingredients very gently for about 10 minutes, keeping them well stirred the whole time, as this sauce is very liable to burn.
TIME.-10 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
White Sauce. (Made without Meat.) - INGREDIENTS for sauce for pair of fowls.-2 oz. of butter, 2 small onions, 1 WHITE SAUCE. carrot, 1/2 a small teacupful of flour,1 pint of new milk, salt and cayenne to taste. AVERAGE COST, 5d.
Cut up the onions and carrot very small, and put them into a stewpan with the butter; simmer them till the butter is nearly dried up; then stir in the flour, and add the milk; boil the whole gently until it thickens, strain it, season with salt and cayenne, and it will be ready to serve.
TIME.- hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
White Sauce. (A very Simple and Inexpensive Method.) - INGREDIENTS for sauce for a medium-sized dish.-1½ pint of milk, 1 oz. of rice, 1 strip of lemon-peel, 1 small blade of pounded mace, salt and cayenne to taste. AVERAGE COST, 4d.
Boil the milk with the lemon-peel and rice until the latter is perfectly tender, then take out the lemon-peel and pound the milk and rice together; put it back into the stewpan to warm, add the mace and seasoning, give it one boil, and serve.
This sauce should be of the consistency of thick cream.
TIME. About 1 hour to boil the rice.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain deep-fry, and everything depends on the fish going into the fat dry and coming out fast. Mrs Beeton's cross-reference to "the preceding recipe" is simply: fry until crisp, lift the basket, drain on paper, salt at once.
- A pint of whitebaitWhitebait was sold by volume; a pint is perhaps 8 to 10 oz of fish, which the recipe reckons a dish for three or four. Buy them whole and ungutted, as they are cooked and eaten entire.
- What whitebait isThe fry of herring and sprat, an inch or two long, silver and translucent. Frozen whitebait is the usual supermarket form now and works well, but it must be thawed and then dried thoroughly on cloth or paper or it will spit and steam rather than crisp.
- Fat and temperatureLard was standard and gives a clean flavour; any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the same job. The fat wants to be hot, in the region of 350-375F, hot enough that three minutes is genuinely enough. Cooler fat is what produces the soft, greasy version of this dish.
- Flouring in a clothShaking the fish in floured cloth and then sieving off the excess is the hinge of the recipe. A wet batter or a heavy coating traps steam and defeats the whole point; you want the barest dusting.
- Fry in small batchesA frying basket crammed full drops the fat temperature and the fish stick together in a raft. Two or three handfuls at a time, with the fat allowed to come back up to heat between batches.
- The devilling"Devilled" here means nothing more than a hard hit of cayenne with the salt. Toss both over the fish the moment they leave the fat, while the surface is still hot enough to hold the seasoning. Start with about a quarter teaspoon of cayenne to a teaspoon of salt and adjust.
- ServingCut lemon and thin brown bread and butter are not decoration but the traditional accompaniment, and the dish goes cold quickly. Have plates and bread ready before the fish goes into the fat.
- SeasonThe April-to-August window reflects the run of fry in British estuaries in the nineteenth century. Frozen stock has removed the constraint, though some fisheries are now restricted, so check what is being sold locally.
Whitebait was the great riverside dish of Victorian London, eaten at taverns down the Thames at Greenwich and Blackwall, where the fry were netted in the estuary and fried within the hour. The annual Ministerial Whitebait Dinner at Greenwich, attended by Cabinet members through much of the nineteenth century, fixed the fish in the public mind as an occasion food rather than a cheap one, which explains the fairly stiff 2s 6d Mrs Beeton gives for a pint. "Devilled" in this period meant simply a fierce seasoning of cayenne or mustard applied to something grilled or fried, a usage that runs from devilled kidneys to devilled biscuits, and Beeton prints the plain and devilled versions of whitebait consecutively. The insistence on lemon and brown bread and butter is the standard nineteenth-century service.