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Fried Whitebait
Wash one pound very fresh whitebait in ice water; thoroughly drain, then lightly dip in milk, place on a sieve, sprinkle a light cup cornmeal over and briskly shake them in the meal; then plunge in boiling fat for two minutes. Lift up with the skimmer, drain on a cloth; mix a teaspoon salt with two saltspoons cayenne pepper, equally season with it and shake well in the seasoning. Dress on a hot dish, decorate with six pieces of lemon and a little parsley greens and serve.
A fast fry that depends almost entirely on dryness and fat temperature. Everything else is garnish.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means deep fat, hot enough that the coating sets on contact; in modern terms somewhere in the 350-375F range. Below that the tiny fish absorb oil and slump; the two-minute timing assumes fat hot enough to set the coating immediately.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning is 1 teaspoon salt to 1/2 teaspoon cayenne. That is aggressively hot by current taste; start with half the cayenne and add more at the table.
- Drain hardThe hinge of the recipe. Whitebait washed in ice water carry a great deal of moisture, and wet fish in hot fat spit violently and steam the coating off. Drain, then pat dry before the milk dip.
- CornmealA "light cup" of cornmeal is a loosely filled cup, and most of it is shaken back off through the sieve. Fine cornmeal or a cornmeal-flour mix gives a thinner crust than modern coarse polenta grind.
- Fry in batchesOne pound dropped into a domestic pan at once will pull the fat below frying temperature and the fish will mat together. Work in handfuls, letting the fat recover between batches.
- Buying the fish"Whitebait" is not a species but the fry of herring, sprat and similar fish, and in some places what is sold under the name is now a different fish entirely. Frozen whitebait is usually the practical option and should be thawed and dried thoroughly. They are eaten whole, heads and all, ungutted.
- YieldOne pound would stretch to two as a light main course or four as a first course, though the six pieces of lemon in the original suggest the author had a larger table in mind. Serve at once with the lemon; they lose their crispness within minutes.
Whitebait was for most of the nineteenth century a London dish above all others, netted in the Thames estuary and eaten at riverside taverns at Greenwich and Blackwall, where the annual "whitebait dinner" attended by cabinet ministers was a fixture of the political calendar until the fishery declined. The classic English treatment was a dusting of flour, a very brief plunge into hot fat, cayenne, lemon and brown bread and butter; the cornmeal here is a departure from that pattern. The insistence on fish that is "very fresh" is not decorative, as ungutted fry spoil quickly, which is why whitebait was historically a local dish eaten close to where it was landed rather than something shipped inland.