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Haddock, Baked
Clean the fish, scrape the scales off, and fill it with a good veal forcemeat. Sew up the opening with a little strong thread, and put the haddock into a pie-dish, with about two ounces of butter, broken into small pieces; baste frequently, and bake in a moderate oven. Serve on a hot dish with parsley and sliced lemon. It is an improvement to brush the fish over with beaten egg, and sprinkle it with bread-crumbs before baking. Send melted butter and anchovy sauce to table in a tureen. Time, a moderate-sized haddock, half an hour or more. Probable cost, 10d. or more. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A whole stuffed haddock, roasted in butter in a pie-dish. Nothing here is unsafe or obsolete, but the fish trade and the sauces have moved on since Cassell's day.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350-375F (180-190C). A haddock of 2-3 lb takes 30-40 minutes; the fish is done when the flesh at the thickest part of the backbone comes away cleanly, or reads 145F on a thermometer.
- Buying the fishAsk for a whole haddock, gutted, scaled and with the gills removed but the head on, since the head holds the shape while it bakes. Fishmongers will also pocket-bone it on request, which makes stuffing much easier than working through the belly.
- Veal forcemeatVeal forcemeat of this period is generally either minced veal or a breadcrumb-and-suet mixture with lemon peel, herbs and egg to bind; the book's own forcemeat entry should be checked for which. Ground veal is hard to find in many places now; ground pork, or pork and chicken, behaves much the same. Around 8 oz of stuffing suits a 3 lb fish, packed loosely so it cooks through.
- Sewing upButcher's twine and a trussing needle do the job; three or four stitches are enough. The recipe's "strong thread" is best read as twine rather than fine sewing thread, which may be treated and will pull through the flesh. Alternatively close the cavity with short metal skewers laced with twine.
- Pie-dish and bastingA pie-dish of the period is an oval, moderately deep earthenware baking dish; use any ovenproof dish that fits the fish snugly. Two ounces of butter is roughly half a stick; because there is no liquid in the dish it will darken, so baste every ten minutes and add a splash of water or wine if the pan threatens to scorch.
- Egg and crumbsIf you take the optional coating, do it just before the fish goes in and use dry, fine crumbs. Skip the frequent basting on a crumbed fish or the coating turns to paste; brush it once with melted butter instead.
- The sauces"Melted butter" in Victorian usage is not clarified butter but a flour-thickened butter sauce, closer to a thin bechamel. Anchovy sauce is that same sauce with anchovy essence stirred in; anchovy paste or a couple of mashed fillets gives the same result.
- YieldThree or four servings as written, which is generous by modern portioning for a 2-3 lb fish with stuffing.
Haddock was among the everyday white fish of the British table in the nineteenth century, landed in quantity along the North Sea coast and cheap enough that Cassell's could put a whole one, with its butter, at tenpence or more. Stuffing and baking a round fish whole was a standard way of making a plain, lean fish into a dinner-table dish rather than a plate of fried supper, and the veal forcemeat, egg-and-crumb finish and tureen of anchovy sauce are the same set of moves Victorian cookery applied to baked pike, cod's head and stuffed carp. Anchovy in particular did the work of a savoury seasoning: the essence carried salt, ferment and depth all at once, and it turns up beside almost every baked or boiled white fish in books of this era.