Home › The Principles of Cookery › Haddock, Creamed
Haddock, Creamed
Pour half a pint of boiling milk over a dried haddock, cover it up, and let it remain for five minutes; skin and bone it, and put it into a small stewpan with two gills of cream and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Let it get quite hot again, then thicken with flour and butter, and serve garnished with hard-boiled eggs cut into slices. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A Victorian breakfast or supper dish that stands or falls on the fish: what the book calls a "dried haddock" is a cured haddock, and the whole recipe is really a method for softening it and dressing it in cream.
- What to buyLook for smoked haddock on the bone, or an undyed cold-smoked fillet, or Scottish finnan haddie if you can get it. The bright yellow dyed fillets are usually brine-dipped and can taste saltier in a cream sauce. If what you have is board-hard salt-dried fish rather than smoked, it needs an overnight soak in cold water first; five minutes in hot milk will not touch it.
- Gills and pintsA gill is a quarter of an Imperial pint, 5 fl oz. Two gills of cream is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups; the half pint of boiling milk is the same volume again. The milk is a steeping and de-salting liquid, not part of the sauce.
- Heat the fish through properly"Let it get quite hot again" is too vague for cured fish that has only sat in hot milk for five minutes. Bring the cream up to a bare simmer and hold it there three or four minutes, until the flakes are opaque and hot right through.
- Don't boil the creamA hard boil will make the cream grainy and can curdle it against the salt in the fish. Keep it at a lazy simmer with the pan uncovered so it reduces slightly.
- Thicken with flour and butterThis means beurre manié: about a tablespoon each of soft butter and plain flour mashed to a paste, whisked in a little at a time off the direct heat. Two minutes at a simmer afterwards cooks out the raw flour taste.
- SaltNone is called for and none should be added until the sauce is finished and tasted. Cured haddock carries plenty, and reducing the cream concentrates it.
- Skinning and boningDo this while the fish is still warm from the milk, when the skin peels away in one piece and the pin bones come out with the flakes. Cold cured haddock fights back.
- Yield and servingServes two generously as a light supper, three at breakfast. The recipe specifies only the sliced hard-boiled egg garnish; such dishes were often served on buttered toast or in a border of mashed potato. Add the egg at the last moment.
- That price1s 6d is the book's estimate of what the dish cost to make, not a measurement or an instruction.
Cured haddock was one of the cheapest and most widely eaten fish in nineteenth-century Britain, and the best of it came from the Aberdeenshire coast: "finnan" haddock is generally traced to the village of Findon, just south of Aberdeen, where the fish were split, brined and smoked over peat or hardwood. Because the cure kept the fish edible far inland, smoked haddock became a fixture of the Victorian and Edwardian breakfast table, appearing plainly grilled, in kedgeree, and — as here — flaked into cream. The steeping in boiling milk does two things at once: it rehydrates the fish and pulls out some of the salt and smoke. The sliced hard-boiled egg garnish, and the pinch of cayenne in place of pepper, were both common Victorian practice, a spot of colour and a discreet bite in an otherwise pale dish.