Photographs: Sarah and Brian Halweil, and Jill Musnicki
THE FORGOTTEN TREAT It’s not hard to get little, crunchy fish.
By Brian Halweil
AMAGANSETT—Contrary to popular belief, the worst thing about fried fish isn’t the caloric load it carries. It’s the sputtering mess it makes in the kitchen.
A couple years ago, a friend showed me a solution that he learned from his father when they would haul seine for the ubiquitous whitebait that cloud our waters in the late summer and fall: take the fry outside onto the beach where bits of oil jumping out of the pot are as innocuous as shells in the sand.
In front of his family’s house on Napeague, we recreated this bayside fry by hauling for the small fish that are used to catch stripers, tuna and bigger game. Using a small net with a pole tied to either end, we waded into the bay, one of us heading deeper than the other, so that our net was perpendicular to the shore. Bracing the poles against our bodies, we began to walk against the current, so that our bowing net would catch any fish, seaweed or other debris. (You can easily remove debris from your net by flipping it over, so the dirty side is downstream.) After walking for a few dozen yards, the deep man wrapped around toward shore to encircle the net, which we lifted out of the water and placed on the sand.
Our haul included spearing, sandeels, bunker, and even a few baby flounder, shrimp and bluefish. We dusted them with cornmeal (which proved nice, but unnecessary), and dropped handful after handful into a pot of boiling oil sitting on a campstove. They bubbled on top, and a minute or so later we ladled them onto a paper plate and garnished them with salt and pepper. (Paper-thin slices of homegrown zucchini and eggplant also fried to perfection.)
Our party, which included several small children, couldn’t get enough of the fish—heads, bones, guts, scales and all. The crunchy outside concealed the tender, bay-scented flesh within. We popped the tiny spearing like potato chips. We savored the complex flavor of the larger, oilier species, like peanut bunker, one bite at a time.
Despite the ease and availability of this treat, it appears that the taste for whitebait has dropped off in recent years. “Whitebait can be delicious,” said Colin Mather of the Seafood Shop in Wainscott. “But there isn’t much of a market for food-grade baitfish.” He suggested that most people still have a problem with the idea of eating an entire fish—head and all—no matter how small it is.
“When I was a little kid,” said Harvey Bennet of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, “I watched a guy on a dock down in Montauk, one time on a cold, cold Sunday morning, take a piece of spearing and snap the head off of it and throw it in his mouth and eat it.” Many of his customers fry up the bigger spearing and eat them, although he hasn’t tried it personally. (He’d like to.)
“A whole generation ate whitebait,” said Harry Lester, also of Amagansett. “There was great demand years ago. Never less than a dollar a pound. Now it’s 50 or 10 cents if you get too much of it. People eat it, but not as much.”
As explanation, he offered that “all the old Italians died.” They relished whitebait, he said, and knew how to turn it into everything from pickles to meatballs. (From New Zealand to Ecuador, coastal people around the world still enjoy whitebait; in 17th-century England, tavern keepers served “whitebait dinners,” which were all the rage, according to the Oxford Companion to Food.)
And, people are too lazy to catch and cook whitebait now. “They’ve all got money, so they buy shrimp and lobster,” Lester said.
“This way they get it served to them on a platter. It’s the good old American way, bub. It ain’t like it used to be.”
Lester should know. He’s been fishing the bay and ocean shoals where whitebait converge since he was 15 years old. (He was 75 when he told me this.) In fact, his haul was so prolific that it earned him the nickname, “Harry Ding the Whitebait King.”
Until a few years ago, Lester sold fresh and frozen whitebait out of his home on Cross Highway, which used to be called “fish gut alley,” Lester growled with a laugh. “It was solid fishermen.”
Whitebait, the commercial term for baitfish that are about four to six inches long, includes an array of species, each with a distinctive use. (Other common terms for these silvery, translucent fish include silversides, shiners, sperling and spearing.)
“The big ones are spearing. They catch fluke with that,” Lester explained. “The little ones and medium-size catch snapper. Those are the eating kind.”
Other common whitebait species are sandeels, thin, eel-like fish, and peanut bunker, smaller versions of the foot-long herring also called menhaden and used as chum during chunk fishing.
“They use sandeels for fluke,” Lester explained. “I’ve caught thousands of bushels of them in the last 40 or 50 years. And tons of bunker. They’re good for bass. They chum them up behind the boat, and use them for tuna bait.” (Of course, once the fish have been frozen to keep as bait, they are no longer as good for eating.)
When bait-fishing, Lester would use a net many times longer (often more than 100 feet) than the kids’ net that we used in Napeague. Our haul-seining lite, while not as arduous or productive (a four-year-old had a successful run as half of the team), still yielded plenty of fish for a warm afternoon meal in late summer.
Another essential ingredient worth noting: cold beer. “When frying fish you’ve got to have a beer in your hand,” said Bennet. “In the dictionary, it’s one word: Fishfry-beer.”
