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Whitebait, Devilled
Dip one pound fresh, well cleaned and wiped whitebait in cold milk, then drain on sieve, dredge over six tablespoons cornmeal flour, shake well, then sprinkle over a teaspoon English mustard in powder, shake well again, lay in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat two minutes. Remove, sprinkle over while in the basket a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons cayenne pepper; shake well again. Dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with six quarters lemon and a little parsley greens and serve.
A fast fry with a hot coating, and almost everything depends on keeping the fish dry and the fat hot. The two-minute timing in the original is correct and should not be stretched.
- What whitebait isNot a species but the fry of herring, sprat and similar fish, eaten whole — head, bones and all. Look for them frozen at fishmongers and Asian and Mediterranean groceries; thaw fully and pat very dry, since ice water will ruin the coating and spit in the fat.
- Cornmeal flourMost likely finely milled cornmeal, nearer fine polenta than coarse grits; note that this is not cornstarch, which is what British 'cornflour' means. Six tablespoons is a light dusting for a pound of tiny fish, not a batter.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them is half a teaspoon of cayenne, tossed over a pound of fish along with a full teaspoon of English mustard powder. That is a genuinely fierce seasoning by modern standards; halve both if you want the fish to taste of fish.
- Boiling fatFat does not boil — the phrase means fat at frying heat, about 375F. Below that the coating goes greasy; much above it and these small fish scorch before the two minutes are up. Fry in batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Two minutes, no moreWhitebait are thin enough to cook through almost instantly. Left longer they dry out and the tails turn to splinters, so pull the basket as soon as the coating is pale gold and crisp.
- English mustard powderColman's or equivalent. Dry mustard powder is nearly flavourless until it meets moisture; here the only moisture is the milk-damp coating. Whether that is the reason it is dusted on rather than stirred into a wet batter is a guess, not something the recipe says.
- The folded napkinA period convention for absorbing frying fat at the table. Paper towel under the napkin does the same job with less laundry.
- YieldA pound serves three or four as a first course, or two as a light main with bread and the lemon.
Devilling — dressing something with mustard, cayenne and other hot spices before a brisk cooking — became a fixture of British cooking in the early nineteenth century, its name often said to be a joke about infernal heat, and its taste for pungency generally traced to the Anglo-Indian palate of returning colonial households. Whitebait itself was a London institution: the fry were netted in the tidal Thames and eaten in quantity at the riverside taverns of Greenwich and Blackwall, where the annual whitebait dinner attended by cabinet ministers ran through much of the nineteenth century. The dish was firmly identified with England rather than with the fish, which is caught and fried much the same way from Spain to Japan. The insistence on frying whole and eating whole is the point of the dish, and the reason it survives on menus today.