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Haddock, Curried
Clean and skin the fish, lift the flesh from the bones, then divide it into pieces about three inches long and one inch wide. For a fish three pounds in weight put three quarters of a pint of good, nicely-flavoured stock into a saucepan, and thicken it with a dessert-spoonful of curry-powder and a tea-spoonful of flour, mixed smoothly with two table-spoonfuls of the gravy. Mince two onions very finely, and put them into the soup. Add a quarter of a pint of cream or new milk. Flour the pieces of fish, and fry them in hot lard or driping till they are brightly browned. Drain them from the fat, and put them into the gravy. Simmer gently for eight or ten minutes, skim the sauce, put the fish into the middle of the dish, pour the sauce over it, and serve. Time, one hour. Probable cost of haddock, 9d. or upwards. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian Anglo-Indian fish curry built on a thickened stock rather than a fried onion base. Two things need attention: the onions go into the sauce raw, and the curry powder is never toasted.
- Sweat the onions firstAs written, finely minced raw onion goes straight into the stock, and the recipe sets no time for cooking it beyond the eight to ten minutes' simmer with the fish — enough to soften, but not necessarily to lose its raw bite. Cook the onion gently in a little fat until translucent before adding the stock, and the sauce tastes finished rather than sharp.
- Bloom the curry powderCommercial curry powder is raw ground spice and tastes dusty if it is only stirred into liquid. Fry it with the onion for a minute, or stir it into the flour paste and let the sauce simmer several minutes before the fish goes in.
- Imperial measuresThree quarters of an Imperial pint is 15 fl oz, roughly 1¾ US cups; a quarter pint of cream is 5 fl oz, about ⅔ cup. A dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons, so the spicing is modest — a full tablespoon suits most modern palates.
- "New milk"Fresh, unskimmed milk straight from the dairy. Whole milk is the equivalent; single cream or half-and-half gives the richer version the recipe offers as the alternative.
- Frying fatLard or beef dripping browns the floured fish well and was simply what was to hand. Clarified butter, ghee or a neutral high-smoke-point oil does the same job; ghee suits the spicing best.
- Don't boil after the creamOnce the dairy is in, keep the sauce at a bare tremble. A hard boil risks splitting it, and the already-fried haddock will fall apart. Eight minutes of gentle simmering is genuinely enough for one-inch strips.
- YieldA 3 lb whole haddock gives roughly 1½ lb of skinned, boned flesh — consistent with the four to five portions claimed.
- "Time, one hour"The stated hour must cover cleaning and boning the fish as well as cooking, since the cooking itself amounts only to the frying and eight to ten minutes' simmering. Starting from bought fillets cuts it considerably.
Curried fish of this kind is a product of the long Anglo-Indian exchange that made curry powder a familiar item in British kitchens: a blended, ready-ground powder sold by grocers, used less as Indian cookery than as a way of dressing up plain or leftover protein. Haddock was an obvious candidate inepence or upwards and the treatment is thoroughly English in construction, being a flour-and-stock sauce enriched with cream, with the spice added as a flavouring rather than as the foundation of the dish. Cassell's, an encyclopaedic dictionary aimed at middle-class households running on a budget, carries a number of such curries across fish, mutton, rabbit and reheated joints; their presence says more about Victorian thrift and the reach of empire-era grocery than about the cooking of any particular region of India.