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Haddock, Boiled, with Egg Sauce
Shred two ounces of beef suet very finely, and mix with it four ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, a tea-spoonful of thyme, and a shallot, finely minced; add a little pepper and salt, and a grate or two of nutmeg, and work all together with a raw egg. Fill the haddock with this stuffing, sew it up with strong thread, truss it in the shape of the letter S, and boil it in salt and water. When done, take it up, drain, and serve garnished with parsley. Boil two eggs for seven minutes. When cold, powder the yolks, and mix them with half a pint of good melted butter. Add the whites, cut up into small dice, boil up once, and serve in a tureen. Time to boil a good-sized haddock, half an hour. Probable cost, variable, about 6d. per pound. Sufficient, a haddock weighing two pounds for three or four persons.
A stuffed whole haddock poached in salted water, served with a Victorian egg sauce. Two things in the original need translating before it works on a modern stove: the cooking time and the phrase "melted butter".
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn nineteenth-century British cookery this means a flour-thickened butter sauce; proportions vary from book to book, but something on the order of 1-2 oz butter to about 1 oz flour cooked together and let down with about half a pint of milk or fish liquor. Plain molten butter will not carry the chopped egg and will split.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml, not the 8 fl oz US measure. With the egg folded in it makes enough sauce for four.
- Half an hour is too longA 2 lb haddock, even stuffed, is done in about 12 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer. Half an hour at a rolling boil will shred the fish off the bone and squeeze it dry. Bring the water barely to a tremble, slide the fish in, and hold it just below simmering; the flesh should part cleanly from the backbone.
- The poaching liquidSalt and water alone is austere. Roughly a tablespoon of salt per 2 litres is right, and a splash of vinegar or lemon helps keep the flesh white and firm. A fish kettle or a deep roasting tin across two burners handles a whole fish better than a stockpot.
- Beef suetShredded packet suet works directly. Fresh beef suet from a butcher needs the membrane picked out before it will shred finely. Cold grated butter is a common substitute, though it gives a softer, less open stuffing.
- Trussing in an SCurving the fish and tying it, or running a skewer through, would have suited a round pot and helped hold the sewn belly closed. A straight fish in an oval kettle needs only the belly stitched with cotton kitchen twine; remove the thread before serving.
- The eggsSeven minutes gives a just-set yolk that crumbles rather than powders. For a yolk dry enough to sieve, go to nine or ten minutes and cool the eggs in cold water so the yolks stay yellow.
- "Boil up once"Bring the sauce back to a bare bubble only, then take it off. Sustained boiling after the egg goes in turns the whites tough and rubbery.
- YieldAs the original says, a 2 lb fish serves three or four. Plain boiled or steamed potatoes are a usual period accompaniment.
Haddock was one of the great cheap fish of the British table, landed in quantity on the east coast of Scotland and northern England and sold fresh inland once the railways reached the ports; the sixpence a pound quoted here places it well below turbot or salmon. Cassell's, published in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, offers a recipe that is characteristic of its kind: a whole fish made to look like a set piece by stuffing, trussing and a tureen of sauce, at a fraction of the cost of a joint. Egg sauce, essentially the standard flour-and-butter sauce with hard-boiled egg stirred through, was a usual partner to boiled white fish in Victorian and Edwardian cooking, and survived longest alongside boiled salt cod on Good Friday. The forcemeat of suet, breadcrumbs, parsley, thyme and shallot is the sort of all-purpose stuffing that would serve equally for a fowl or a shoulder of veal.