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By Root 1076 0

if he could bring another close friend of his, Pitt, the Prime Minister. The day went well, the three men got on happily over the bottles and the occasion was repeated. The only snag was the long journey in those pre-railway days. To make things easier, Robert Preston invited the two men to dine at Greenwich; a fourth and then a fifth friend, both in the government, were invited along and eventually the annual whitebait dinner became a semi-official way of celebrating the end of the parliamentary session. The original three were all members of Trinity House, the date was fixed each year soon after Trinity Monday just before the House rose, and the dinners went on long after the deaths of Pitt and Old George and Robert Preston.

Other Londoners, rich and poor, Whig as well as Tory, delighted in what was then a jaunt to the countryside, to eat whitebait. Everyone set out to have a good time. Like the Trinity House trio, they drank too much, which led occasionally to rioting and fights among the lower orders; the nobs, I take it, got drunk more quietly. ‘The peculiar attraction… consists in the trip, the locality, the fresh air, and perhaps the whitebait – for it loses its delicacy by transportation, and is seldom so well dressed as in the immediate proximity of its haunts.’

Whitebait dinners could be ordered that were far more than a picnic or a pub lunch. In 1835, according to Thomas Walker, in his short-lived weekly, The Original, the smart place to go was Lovegrove’s in Blackwall. There he had ordered the following dinner for a party of eight: ‘Turtle, followed by no other fish but whitebait; which is to be followed by no other meat but grouse; which are to be succeeded by apple fritters and jelly.’ They finished off with ices and a good dessert. They drank punch with the turtle, claret with the grouse – and champagne with the whitebait. The post-mortem concluded that a Water-souchy of flounders should have come after the turtle.

That was a simple little meal compared with the feast described by that splendid gastronome, Thomas Love Peacock who, a few years on, made his way there with friends, in the heat of the summer:

All day we sat, until the sun went down –

‘Twas summer, and the Dog-star scorched the town –

At fam’d Blackwall, O Thames! upon thy shore,

Where Lovegrove’s tables groan beneath their store;

We feasted full on every famous dish,

Dress’d many ways, of sea and river fish –

Perch, mullet, eels, and salmon, all were there,

And whitebait, daintiest of our fishy fare;

Then meat of many kinds, and venison last,

Quails, fruits, and ices crowned the rich repast.

Thy fields, Champagne, supplied us with our wine,

Madeira’s Island, and the rocks of Rhine.

The sun was set, and twilight veiled the land:

Then all stood up – all who had strength to stand,

And pouring down, of Maraschino, fit

Libations to the gods of wine and wit,

In steam-wing’d chariots, and on iron roads,

Sought the great city, and our own abodes.

In other words, they went home by train.

As a comment on occasions such as this, I quote a distich by Tennyson’s eccentric elder brother, Frederick:

I had a vision very late

After a dinner of whitebait.

It might seem from all this that whitebait is an exclusively English delicacy and, perhaps in the scale of its celebrations over more than a century, it is indeed unique. Many other countries, though, eat similar dishes. The riverside Friture de poisson in France has the same air of country festivity, although the fish tend to be larger. There are also blanchailles to be found (bianchetti in Italy) and a melange of pellucid sole and other minute items of the Gobiidae family found in the Mediterranean area under the name of nonnats. They eat such things, too, in New Zealand and South America, and I dare say in Africa, Australia and China. And ‘virtually any saltwater bay along the East or West coasts of America will provide a whitebait dinner’, consisting mainly of tiny sand-eels and silversides. The Japanese