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Gravy for Haddock, Baked
Brown a sliced onion in a little butter, and add gradually a pint of good stock, or a tea-spoonful of Bovril dissolved in warm water. Thicken with a table-spoonful of flour, and let the mixture simmer with a bunch of parsley for twenty minutes. Skim off the fat, strain the gravy, and add pepper and salt to taste, a little browning, if necessary, and a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup. Serve in a tureen. Probable cost, 2d. Sufficient for a pint of gravy.
A brown onion gravy meant to be poured over a whole baked haddock, usually one that has been stuffed with veal forcemeat. The method is sound; only the shopping list has dated.
- The hinge: brown the onion properlyMuch of the colour and depth here comes from the onion caramelising in butter, so give it 10-15 minutes over a moderate heat rather than a few minutes. A pale onion base may be why the recipe then allows "a little browning" to top up the colour.
- Bovril as a stock substituteOne teaspoon in a pint gives a thin, salty liquid by modern standards. If using a bouillon or stock concentrate in place of real stock, use enough for a pint and hold back the salt until the very end.
- ThickeningA tablespoon of flour to a pint gives a light pouring gravy. Cook the flour into the buttery onions for a minute or two before the liquid goes in, or add it as a paste with cold stock; tipping dry flour into hot liquid will leave lumps that the straining alone will not fix.
- Browning"Browning" was bottled burnt-sugar caramel colouring, still sold as gravy browning in Britain. It adds colour and a faint bitterness and nothing else. A well-browned onion base makes it unnecessary.
- Mushroom ketchupNot tomato ketchup. This is a thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquid, closer to Worcestershire sauce or a light soy in function. Either of those, used sparingly, stands in for it.
- Bunch of parsleyStalks and all, added for perfume and removed at the straining stage; cooks of the period would usually have tied the bunch. Parsley stems are often held to carry more flavour than the leaves, so using the whole bunch makes sense here.
- Yield and servingA pint, generous for one baked fish serving several. "Serve in a tureen" means the gravy goes to the table in its own vessel rather than being poured over the fish in the dish.
- Probable cost, 2dCassell's gives a "probable cost" and a yield for nearly every entry, a habit aimed at households running to a weekly budget. Twopence for a pint suggests the stock was assumed to be already in the house rather than bought.
Cassell's belongs to the era when a large baked haddock, stuffed and served whole, was a standard cheap dinner in British households, and when the accompanying gravy was treated as a separate recipe with its own costing. The two shortcuts named here date the entry precisely: Bovril, the beef extract that came out of John Lawson Johnston's Montreal meat-extract business and was sold under that name in Britain from the 1880s, and mushroom ketchup, the older of the two by a century or more, a pre-tomato English condiment made by salting mushrooms and straining off the dark liquor. Both existed to give a meaty depth to dishes when there was no long-simmered stock at hand, and their appearance in a fish gravy shows how freely Victorian cooks reached for savoury beef notes alongside fish, a pairing later fashion largely abandoned.