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Updated: July 25, 2025
'Middle-class respectability living in Pimlico or further Kensington, scoffed Biddy. 'Ordering sprats and plaice for dinner and pretending they're soles and whitebait. Perambulators stuffing up the hall; paying your own books and having your gown made at home! No, thank you. 'Possum skins and a black's gunya that's Australese for a wigwam, isn't it? appeal to me infinitely more.
Robert Falconer was watching that table, too.... Perhaps she would not return till late; perhaps he would have only a tiny time with her that evening.... And he had not been able to buy out that man's berth upon the steamer.... Consommé and whitebait, boeuf rôti and haricots vert and crême de cérises succeeded one another in deepening gloom. The whole dinner over, and she had not appeared!
And then he looked around, and recognising Mrs. Rodney, was immediately at her side. "I must have the honour of taking you into dinner. I got your note, but only by this morning's post." The dinner was a banquet, a choice bouquet before every guest, turtle and venison and piles of whitebait, and pine-apples of prodigious size, and bunches of grapes that had gained prizes.
The attempt to fatigue Thorndyke's brain with superabundant detail was like trying to surfeit a pelican with whitebait. He consumed it all with calm enjoyment and asked for more; and when, at last, I did really begin to think that I had bored him a little, he staggered me by reading over his notes and starting a brisk cross-examination to elicit fresh facts!
From these nets, when at last they were landed after an hour or so of continual dragging by a dozen or twenty men and women, were taken huge baskets-full of silvery little fish sparkling in the sun, exactly like whitebait. I had always supposed that whitebait was a specialty of the Thames.
When the expenses of production were paid, the balance was spent on a whitebait dinner at Greenwich, and on offerings of flowers and jewellery to the lady guests invited. It came to an end, leaving no successor equally brilliant, high- toned, wholesome; its collected numbers figure sometimes at a formidable price in sales and catalogues. The first two volumes of his "Crimea" had appeared in 1863.
From that time Fan was compelled to fare delicately, and each day in place of the simple quickly-eaten and soon-forgotten chop, there came to her table a soup with some new flavour, a bit of fish salmon cutlets, or a couple of smelts, or dainty whitebait with lemon and brown bread-and- butter, or a red mullet in its white wrapper and exquisitely-tasting little made dishes, and various sweets of unknown names.
And even yet this is as nothing it is only the material side of the question; in truth, a mere trifle compared with the expenditure of brain power on the shifts, worthy of Moliere, invented by some sixty thousand assistants and forty thousand damsels of the counter, who fasten upon the customer's purse, much as myriads of Seine whitebait fall upon a chance crust floating down the river.
Lees had decorated the wardroom with flags and had a little Christmas present for each of us. Some of us had presents from home to open. Later there was a really splendid dinner, consisting of turtle soup, whitebait, jugged hare, Christmas pudding, mince-pies, dates, figs and crystallized fruits, with rum and stout as drinks. In the evening everybody joined in a "sing-song."
The mother, who has a contract with some such big restaurateur as ours, chooses a convenient area of moonlight, and then at a given sign they all turn over on their sides, and bask and bask in the rays, little fin pressed lovingly against little fin for this is the happiest time in the young whitebait's life: it is at these silvering parties that matches are made and future consignments of whitebait arranged for.
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