Formerly white bait, white-bait. [f. WHITE a. + BAIT sb.; so called from its former use as bait.] A small silvery-white fish, caught in large numbers in the estuary of the Thames and elsewhere, and esteemed as a delicacy.
Formerly reckoned by some as a distinct species, but now proved to consist of the fry of various fishes, chiefly the herring and sprat.
1758. Descr. Thames, 227. A young Herring is by some termed a Yaulin, or a White Bait.
1763. in Priv. Lett. Ld. Malmesbury (1870), I. 93. We got back to Greenwich to dine. We had the smallest fish I ever saw, called whitebait; they are only to be eat at Greenwich, and are held in high estimation by the epicures.
1831. T. L. Peacock, Crotchet Castle, vii. As delicate as whitebait in July.
1836. Mollard, Art of Cookery, 38. To dress White Bait. This is a fish peculiar to Greenwich and Blackwall.
1862. Miss Braddon, Lady Audley, xxxiv. There are people who dislike salmon, and whitebait, and spring ducklings, and all manner of old-established delicacies.
b. attrib.
Whitebait dinner: a dinner at which whitebait was eaten, held annually at Greenwich and attended by cabinet ministers from early in the 19th century till 1894. For the origin of the dinner see Encycl. Brit. (ed. 11), XII. 554.
1836. Disraeli, Lett. to Ld. Glenelg, 12 March. His Majesty’s Ministers may then hold Cabinet Councils to arrange a white-bait dinner at Blackwall.
1840. Marryat, Poor Jack, viii. Whitebait parties at the Ship.
[1859. Lever, Dav. Dunn, xxxvi. The Irishman that has soared to the realm of whitebait with a Minister.]
1902. C. J. Cornish, Natur. on Thames, 201. White-bait shoals swarmed in the Lower Thames and the Medway.
c. Applied to other small fishes in different parts of the world resembling this and used as food.
e.g., The Chinese and Japanese fishes of the family Salangidæ, various N. American species of silversides, and various fishes of Australia and New Zealand (see quots.).
1882. Tenison-Woods, Fish N. S. W., 85. Count Castelnau states that it [sc. Engraulis antarcticus] is very common in the Melbourne market … and goes by the name of ‘White-bait.’
1883. Royal Comm. on Fisheries of Tasmania, p. iv. Retropinna Richardsonii, whitebait or smelt. Captured in great abundance in the river Tamar, in the prawn nets.
1886. Sherrin, Handbk. Fishes N. Z., 141. Together with the young of Retropinna Richardsoni, they [sc. Galaxias attenuatus] are called whitebait.
