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HADDOCK, BAKED (another way) (Clean the fish scrape off)
Clean the fish, scrape off the scales, and fill it with a forcemeat made by chopping the liver, and mixing with it four table-spoonfuls of fine bread-crumbs, an ounce of butter, a tea-spoonful of mixed herbs, chopped small, half a teaspoonful of salt, and a quarter of a tea-spoonful of pepper, bound together with the yolk of an egg. Sew the opening in the fish securely with thread. Sprinkle a table-spoonful of chopped onion and a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley at the bottom of a pie-dish, and pour over them an ounce of oil or clarified butter. Season the haddock with pepper and salt, and lay it on the minced herbs. Put the same quantity of onion and parsley over as under it, and pour on it a quarter of a pint of ale, stock, or water. Place three or four lumps of butter here and there on the fish, put a cover on the dish, and bake in a moderate oven. Serve the haddock in its own sauce. Time, a medium-sized haddock, from half to three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 10d. and upwards. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A whole stuffed haddock braised under cover in its own liquor — the method is sound and needs little more than translation of units and a note on the liver.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is 350F (180C, gas 4). The dish is covered and part-braised, so the fish steams as much as it bakes.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, or a generous half-cup. It should come no more than a finger's depth up the dish; this is a braising liquid, not a poaching bath.
- The liverFishmongers rarely leave the liver in a cleaned haddock now. Ask for it when you order a whole fish, or leave it out and add another tablespoon of crumbs plus a little extra butter — the forcemeat binds perfectly well without it.
- "An ounce of butter"Weight, not volume: 1 oz is 2 tablespoons, about 28 g. The same ounce of oil is roughly 2 tablespoons as well.
- Pie-dish and coverAny shallow ovenproof dish that fits the fish will do; foil crimped tightly over the rim substitutes for the cover the recipe calls for. The seal matters more than the vessel -- it keeps the flesh from drying while the herbs perfume the steam.
- Sewing the fishCotton kitchen twine and a trussing needle, or two or three short metal skewers laced with string. Remove before serving. Overstuffing splits the belly cavity, so pack the forcemeat loosely.
- TimingHalf to three-quarters of an hour suits a whole fish of the size the recipe calls medium, probably somewhere around 2 to 3 lb. Test at the thickest point behind the head: the flesh should part cleanly from the backbone at about 145F. Fillets would need 15 to 20 minutes at most.
- Mixed herbsIn Victorian kitchens this usually meant some combination of parsley, thyme and a little marjoram or savoury, sometimes with lemon peel. A teaspoon of dried mixed herbs works, but fresh gives a much better forcemeat.
- The aleA mild brown ale or bitter gives the sauce colour and a faint bitterness that suits haddock; stock is the safer choice if you dislike that edge. Spoon the pan liquor and softened onion over each portion — that is the whole sauce.
Haddock was an everyday white fish of British kitchens in the nineteenth century, landed in large quantities off Scotland and the North Sea coast and cheap enough that Cassell's could quote a whole one at tenpence. Stuffing a round fish with a crumb forcemeat and baking it whole is a long-established English treatment of haddock, and chopping the liver into the stuffing suits a period when fish commonly arrived at the kitchen door ungutted -- the recipe's own first instruction is to clean it. Ale as the braising liquid is one of several options the recipe offers alongside stock or water. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, issued in the closing decades of the century, was built for exactly this sort of reader: it gives a probable cost and the number of persons served for nearly every entry, the marks of a book written for a mistress budgeting a household rather than for a professional kitchen.