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HADDOCK, BAKED (another way) (Wash the fish scrape off)
Wash the fish, scrape off the scales, and in emptying it, open it as little as possible. Sprinkle a little salt, and squeeze the juice of a large lemon upon it; let it stand two or three hours, turning it over once or twice during the time. Mix the finely-grated rind of half a lemon with two ounces of grated bread-crumbs, add half a salt-spoonful of salt, half a salt-spoonful of pepper, and a quarter of a small nutmeg. Wipe the fish quite dry, brush it over with beaten egg, and strew the seasoned crumbs upon it. Put it on a wire drainer in a dish, pour on it four ounces of clarified butter, and bake it in a moderate oven. Baste it two or three times during the process. Send the gravy from the fish to table with it. Time, from twenty minutes to half an hour to bake a moderate-sized fish. Sufficient for two or three persons. Probable cost of haddock, 9d. and upwards.
A whole baked haddock in a lemon cure, crumbed and basted with butter. Everything in it works; the quantities and the oven language need translating.
- Moderate ovenRead this as roughly 350F (180C). The fish is coated in crumbs, so a much hotter oven would colour them before the flesh at the backbone was cooked through.
- Salt-spoonA Victorian salt-spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon, so half a salt-spoonful each of salt and pepper is about an eighth of a teaspoon. That is seasoning for the crumbs only, on top of the little salt sprinkled on the fish at the start.
- Two ounces of bread-crumbsAbout a cup of fresh grated crumbs, or half that by volume if you use dry ones. Fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf brown better under basting butter than commercial dried crumb.
- A quarter of a small nutmegSomewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon freshly grated. Nutmeg with white fish reads as unusual now but was common enough in nineteenth-century fish cookery; it is easy to overdo, so err low.
- Four ounces of clarified butterHalf a cup, which is generous for a two- to three-person fish. Two ounces is enough to baste with and still leave the pan juices the recipe calls "the gravy"; clarified butter is specified because milk solids would scorch over a half-hour bake.
- The wire drainerA rack set inside the dish, so the fish sits clear of the butter and the underside does not stew. Any small cooling rack that fits a roasting tin does the job.
- The lemon and salt standingTwo or three hours of salt and lemon juice firms the flesh and seasons it through, but haddock is delicate and modern fillets or a small fish will go chalky at the surface. Thirty to sixty minutes is plenty unless the fish is over two pounds.
- DonenessTwenty to thirty minutes suits a whole fish of about a pound and a half to two pounds. Cook to 145F at the thickest point beside the backbone, where the flesh should just part from the bone.
- Buying itAsk the fishmonger to scale and gut it and leave it otherwise whole; the instruction to "open it as little as possible" matters, because a wide belly cut lets the butter and juices run out.
Cassell's ran several haddock recipes because haddock was the cheap, plentiful North Sea whitefish of the Victorian table, landed in quantity at Aberdeen, Grimsby and Hull and carried inland by rail; the "9d. and upwards" priced it well below turbot or salmon. British households are often said to have met haddock smoked rather than fresh, in the cured form associated with Findon in Aberdeenshire, so a recipe for baking one whole with lemon, crumbs and clarified butter is aimed at cooks near enough to the coast or a good market to get it fresh. The nutmeg and grated lemon rind in the crumb are a survival of an older English seasoning habit, common through the eighteenth century, which is generally thought to have been retreating from fish cookery by the time this dictionary appeared and to have faded further in the twentieth.