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Haddock, Cold, Curry Of
Pick the meat carefully from the bones in neat pieces, and remove the skin. For a pound of meat put a piece of butter the size of a large egg into a saucepan; when melted put with it two finely-minced onions, turn them about till they are lightly browned, then pour over half a pint of good, nicely-flavoured stock. Put in any bones or trimmings of meat that you may have, and simmer gently for half an hour; then strain the gravy, and add a table-spoonful of flour and a dessert-spoonful of curry-powder, mixed smoothly with a little cold water. Boil again for twenty minutes, and skim carefully. Put in the fish, with a little salt and pepper, if required, and when quite hot serve on a hot dish, with a border of well-boiled rice round it. Probable cost, 4d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian way of using up yesterday's boiled haddock: the curry sauce is built and cooked out entirely on its own, and the fish only goes in at the end to warm through. That order is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: the fish is reheated, not cookedCold cooked haddock is already fully cooked and very fragile. Fold it in off a hard boil, keep the pan at a bare shiver for two or three minutes until hot, and stir as little as possible or the flakes will collapse into the sauce.
- Butter the size of a large eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Victorian books measured butter by eye against eggs and walnuts; a large egg is the roughly 2 oz mark.
- Half a pint of stockAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so about 1¼ US cups. A light fish or vegetable stock suits better than beef; the recipe's "nicely-flavoured" is doing real work, as there is nothing else in the sauce but onion, flour and curry powder.
- Dessert-spoonfulA dessertspoon is two teaspoons. A tablespoon of flour to two teaspoons of curry powder makes a mild, gravy-forward sauce by modern taste; some cooks may prefer more curry powder, cooked in the butter with the onions rather than stirred in cold as the recipe directs.
- Twenty minutes of boiling the sauceLong by current practice, but it is there to cook the raw flour and the curry powder, both of which taste chalky otherwise. If you bloom the powder in the butter first, eight to ten minutes at a simmer is enough, topping up with stock as it reduces.
- Bones and trimmingsSimmering the bones and scraps in the onion stock for half an hour is a small fish fumet and worth doing (the skin is discarded earlier). Strain through a fine sieve, not a colander, or you will find bones in the finished dish.
- Yield and the rice borderServes three or four as written, from a pound of picked fish. The "border of well-boiled rice" means plain long-grain rice pressed into a ring around the edge of a hot platter with the curry spooned into the middle; a bowl of rice alongside does the same job.
- Probable cost, 4d.Fourpence, exclusive of the cold fish. Cassell's gives a probable cost for most of its recipes so a household could budget, and the figure signals what this dish was for: turning leftovers into a second meal for almost nothing.
Curried leftovers were a fixture of the British middle-class kitchen through the nineteenth century, and cold fish curry sat alongside kedgeree as one of the second lives available to boiled haddock or cod. Commercial curry powder had been sold in London since the late eighteenth century and became a pantry staple, a single tin standing in for the whole spice box; recipes of this period treat it as one ingredient, measured by the spoonful, much as they treat mustard or mace. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery is arranged alphabetically as a reference work rather than a menu book, so entries like this one appear under the fish rather than under curry, and the priced-out costings reflect its readership of households running on a fixed weekly allowance where nothing cooked was thrown away.