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Haddock Croutes
According to the number of persons, take some Aberdeen haddock, poach it in some milk. Take out the haddock when cooked, break it into small pieces and keep hot. Then reduce some of the milk the fish was cooked in, and add eggs as for scrambled, then mix your fish; add a little chopped parsley and shallot previously dipped in butter, then serve up on croutes of Hovis bread, fried in butter.
A smoked haddock scramble on fried bread, of the kind that appeared at breakfast or as a savoury at the end of dinner. The method is sound; the vocabulary is what dates it.
- Aberdeen haddockThis means smoked haddock — what a fishmonger now sells as finnan haddie or, more loosely, undyed smoked haddock. It is already salted and cured, so add no salt until the finished mixture is tasted.
- Poaching in milkBarely cover the fish with milk and hold it just below a simmer for 5 to 8 minutes depending on thickness, until it flakes. Boiling toughens the flesh and curdles the milk you are about to reduce.
- The hinge: the eggsThe reduced milk is stirred into beaten eggs and cooked as a soft scramble over low heat, off the heat for the last few seconds. If the eggs set firm before the fish goes in, the mixture turns granular and weeps.
- How much milk to reduceThe original gives no quantity. Two or three tablespoons of reduced poaching milk per three eggs is about right; more than that and the scramble will not hold together on the crouton.
- "Dipped in butter"Read this as sweated in butter: the chopped shallot wants a minute or two in foaming butter to lose its raw bite. The original phrase appears to cover both parsley and shallot, though adding the parsley at the end will keep it greener.
- Hovis breadHovis was, and is, a British brand of brown bread, specifically a wheatgerm loaf rather than a plain wholemeal; the point here is simply that the croutes are brown rather than white. Cut slices about 1 cm thick, crusts off, and fry in butter until crisp on both sides.
- YieldThree eggs and roughly 200 g of skinned smoked haddock will cover four croutes, enough for two at breakfast or four as a savoury.
Smoked haddock reached Victorian and Edwardian breakfast tables from the north-east of Scotland, where the cure is traditionally traced to the fishing village of Findon, south of Aberdeen — hence "finnan". By this period cured fish travelled by rail to London daily, and smoked haddock with egg had become a fixture of the English breakfast sideboard alongside kedgeree and devilled kidneys. The croute itself belongs to the same period's fondness for the savoury: a small, salty, hot mouthful on fried bread served after the sweet course, when the sweet wine had been cleared and the port brought in. The naming of Hovis in the instructions is a small piece of commercial history in itself, a reminder that by the turn of the century branded factory bread was familiar enough to be specified by name in a cookery book.