Off the menu

An Indian friend with whom I have been staying in the Nilgiri Hills was asking what had happened to the whitebait which he used to enjoy years ago in England, during his time at Cambridge. In those far-off days whitebait appeared on restaurant or pub menus as a starter with the same frequency as egg mayonnaise or half an avocado pear. Tiny fish known as whiting in Tamil Nadu made very good whitebait, he said, and I had seen something similar in Kerala (there called mullet) pulled from the sea in those ‘Chinese’ fishing nets introduced from the Far East in the 14th century. Deep-fried whitebait, using whatever fish they may be, and dusted with flour and chilli powder, make a popular dish in the clubs of south India —where steak-and-kidney pie is still to be found on the menu as often as chicken biryani.

The traditionally English whitebait, however, are likely to come frozen from Holland these days. Time was when shoals of whitebait (the fry of sprats and herring, though they were once thought to be a distinct species) swarmed around the Thames estuary and were as popular as oysters in the taverns of the south-east. Annual whitebait dinners were first held in Dagenham on the Essex shore in the 18th century, and to one of these Pitt was invited as prime minister. The occasions became popular with government ministers and were later transferred to Greenwich (handier for the House of Commons), where they were held regularly until the 1890s.

Today the tradition survives in the whitebait dinner held every autumn by the Saints and Sinners Club at the Trafalgar Tavern, but the baby fishes will probably have been brought from off the Dutch coast. Several other countries outside Europe, such as India and Japan, have their own versions of whitebait.