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Haddock, Flaked
Boil a fresh haddock in the usual way, and when cooked lift the flesh from the bones, and let it fall into flakes. Season with pepper and salt, and sprinkle a little lemon juice over it. Have ready a cupful of white sauce (see WHITE SAUCE FOR FISH). Toss the fish and the sauce together; arrange the mixture on a dish that can be sent to table, put bread-crumbs on top, and bake in a hot oven for about fifteen minutes. Probable cost, from 6d., according to size of fish.
A straightforward fish gratin from the era when a boiled haddock's leftovers were expected to reappear at breakfast or supper. Two things need translating: the oven and the sauce.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; by later convention a "hot" oven is taken as roughly 425-450F (220-230C). The dish goes in already cooked, so the fifteen minutes is only to brown the crumbs and heat through; watch the top rather than the clock.
- Boil in the usual wayThe phrase points back to the book's own method for boiling fish, generally a whole fish cooked in salted water. Modern practice is gentler: bring the water barely to a tremble, slide in the fish, and hold it off the boil for 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness until the flesh parts from the bone. A rolling boil shreds haddock and washes out its flavour.
- A cupful of white sauceReckon 8-10 fl oz (a British cupful was often taken as about half a pint). If the referenced fish sauce is built on butter, flour and part of the fish cooking liquor rather than all milk, reserving half a cup of the poaching water makes a noticeably better sauce. It should coat the flakes, not flood them.
- Season the fish, not just the sauceThe recipe seasons the flakes before they meet the sauce, and that order matters. Salt and pepper applied directly to warm fish, with the lemon juice, carry far better than the same amounts stirred into the sauce.
- Bread-crumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not fresh soft crumbs and not the fine orange commercial sort. Toss them with a little melted butter or they will scorch at the top of a hot oven before the dish is warmed through.
- Dish that can be sent to tableAny shallow ovenproof gratin dish. The instruction is a reminder that the mixture is assembled in its serving vessel; do not build it in a tin and try to move it.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities beyond the cupful of sauce; as a rough guide a haddock of a pound and a half to two pounds with that much sauce will serve three or four as a light main course, more as a savoury alongside toast. Best eaten straight from the oven.
- Cost"from 6d.", a plausible starting price for a small fresh haddock in a British market in the later nineteenth century, rising with the size of the fish. It is included because the book gives a probable cost for each entry.
Flaked fish bound in white sauce and browned under crumbs is the backbone of a whole family of British supper dishes, and it existed because the boiled fish of one meal had to earn its keep at the next. Haddock was the workhorse: abundant on the North Sea grounds, cheap, and firm enough that the flesh comes away from the bone in the clean flakes the recipe depends on. The point of the entry is the technique of combining cooked fish with a sauce in correct proportion, a lesson the reader could then apply to cod, whiting or salmon. The cross-reference to a separate white sauce for fish reflects a common late-Victorian preference for keeping distinct sauce bases for meat, fish and vegetables rather than one all-purpose bechamel.