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Whitebait with Curry
Dip one pound fresh, well-cleaned and wiped whitebait in cold milk, take up and place on a sieve. Sprinkle over two handfuls cornmeal flour, tossing well while adding, place in frying basket, fry in boiling fat for two minutes, remove, drain well in the basket.
Mix on a saucer a teaspoon salt, teaspoon curry powder and saltspoon cayenne, then sprinkle it over the whitebait while tossing in basket, dress on a dish with folded napkin, decorate with six quarters of lemon and serve.
A fast fry-and-toss recipe that lives or dies on the state of the fish going into the fat. Everything else is seasoning.
- The hinge: dry fish, hot fatWhitebait carry a lot of surface water, and wet fish steam rather than crisp and make the fat spit violently. The milk dip is only there to glue on the meal, so lift them out promptly and let them drain on the sieve before coating.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means deep fat at frying heat, conventionally somewhere in the region of 350-375F, though the recipe itself names no temperature. Two minutes suits fish this small, and they should be pale gold, not brown.
- WhitebaitIn Britain the word means the fry of herring or sprat, eaten whole, head, bones and all. American fishmongers sell silversides, smelt fry or anchovy fry under the same name. Any tiny whole fish of an inch or two works; if all you can get is three-inch smelt, they will need closer to three minutes.
- Cornmeal flourThis means finely milled cornmeal, not a coarse polenta grind and not cornstarch. Two handfuls is an imprecise measure, likely half a cup or more, and the fish should be barely dusted rather than battered.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. With a full teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of curry powder over one pound, the mix is assertive; add it in stages and taste, since curry powders vary a great deal in salt and heat.
- Frying basketA wire basket lets you shake the seasoning through the whole batch at once, which is the point of the method. A spider and a wide bowl do the same job. Season the moment they come out of the fat, while the surface is still oily enough to hold the powder.
- BatchesA pound dropped in at once will collapse the temperature of the fat and the fish will clump. Fry in three or four small batches and keep them uncovered so they stay crisp.
- Yield and serviceOne pound serves three or four as a first course, two as a light main. The folded napkin on the dish is there to absorb draining oil; a linen napkin or paper still does it, and the lemon is not decoration but the seasoning that finishes the plate.
Whitebait belongs to the nineteenth-century English table before it belongs to anyone else: the whitebait dinners at Greenwich and Blackwall, on the Thames below London, were a fixture of the season, and a ministerial whitebait dinner is generally said to have closed the parliamentary year for much of the 1800s. The classic treatment was flour, hot fat, salt, cayenne and lemon, and nothing more. The curry powder here is the Anglo-Indian layer that settled over British cooking through the same century, when commercially blended curry powder had become an ordinary grocery item and cooks used it much as they used cayenne or paprika, as a warm seasoning rather than the basis of a curry.