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Haddock, Cold
Put a piece of butter the size of a large egg into a stewpan, and when melted add a teaspoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, one or two grates of nutmeg, and three-quarters of a pint of new milk or cream. When these are quite hot, add the cold haddock, which has been lifted from the bones in neat pieces and freed from skin, and eight or a dozen oysters, chopped small. When on the point of boiling turn the whole on a hot dish, and garnish with sippets of bread. Time, about half an hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the cold fish, 3s., if made with milk. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian way of using up yesterday's boiled haddock, closer to a creamed fish in a shallow pool of sauce than to a modern fish pie. The whole point is gentle heat: this is a reheat, not a cooking.
- Never let it boilThe instruction to take it off "on the point of boiling" is the hinge. Already-cooked haddock that boils in milk goes dry and shreds into cotton, and unthickened milk will catch and split. Keep it at a bare shiver.->
- Butter the size of a large eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Victorian cookbooks commonly gave fat by comparison to eggs and walnuts as well as by weight.
- Three-quarters of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 15 fl oz — a little under 2 US cups. "New milk" means fresh whole milk, unskimmed; cream gives a sauce far less likely to separate.
- The half-hour is not cooking timeThirty minutes covers picking the fish off the bones and warming the milk through. The fish and oysters themselves want only a few minutes in the hot liquid.
- OystersChopped small and dropped into near-boiling milk they will firm up almost at once; longer and they turn to rubber. Modern shucked oysters come in tubs with their liquor, which can go in too. If you would rather they were fully cooked through, hold the pan at a steady simmer for two or three minutes before serving, accepting a slightly firmer fish.
- The sauce will be thinThere is no flour here, so expect a seasoned milk rather than a coating sauce, sopped up with the bread; if you want body, make a plain white sauce with the butter and milk first, then add the fish.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter, set around the edge of the dish. They are structural as much as decorative — they absorb the loose sauce.
- Cost and yield"3s." is three shillings, a price note for a Victorian housekeeper and of no use now. Four to five servings as written, though with 15 fl oz of milk it is a light supper dish rather than a main course.
Cassell's belongs to a generation of large household dictionaries written for cooks running a household on a budget, and its many "cold" entries — cold haddock, cold beef, cold fowl — reflect a kitchen where a boiled fish appeared whole at one meal and had to be accounted for at the next. Haddock was a cheap and abundant North Sea fish in Victorian Britain, sold fresh in inland cities once the railways reached the ports, and smoked as finnan or Arbroath smokie where it was not. The oysters are the period detail most likely to surprise: before the beds of the Thames estuary and the Kent and Essex coasts were exhausted late in the century, oysters were a working-class food and a routine cheap seasoning for fish and meat dishes rather than a luxury. Sippets — the word is generally traced to the same root as "sop" — were the standard garnish for anything served in a sauce, and appear throughout the book as a matter of course.