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Haddock, Pickled
Mix a table-spoonful of salt with half a table-spoonful of pepper and a table-spoonful of finely-chopped parsley. Take four good-sized haddocks, wash and scale them, divide them into slices an inch thick, and put them at the bottom of a deep baking-dish, in layers, with the seasoning and four finely-minced onions strewn over each layer. Pour over all two pints of vinegar and one pint of water. Lay two or three bay-leaves at the top, cover the dish closely, and bake in a moderate oven. Let the haddocks get cold, then pour over them some melted lard or clarified butter. Keep the air from them, and they will remain good some time. Time, two hours to bake. Probable cost, 9d. each or upwards.
This is a preserve, not a supper dish: the fish is baked in vinegar and then sealed under a layer of solid fat so it can be kept out of the cold larder for weeks. That final step is the reason the recipe cannot be followed today, and the notes below explain what each part of it meant and where it fails.
- The fat seal is the fatal stepCooked fish held under an airtight cap of lard or clarified butter at room temperature is the textbook environment for Clostridium botulinum: low oxygen, low salt, moist protein, and no further heating before it is eaten. Cassell's instruction to "keep the air from them" is precisely the condition that allows the organism to produce toxin, which is odourless and tasteless and is not destroyed by the brief warming of the fat.
- The acid is diluted below a preserving strengthTwo pints of vinegar to one pint of water reduces Victorian malt vinegar of roughly 4-5 per cent acetic acid to somewhere near 3 per cent, and the water released by four haddocks dilutes it further. Nothing in the recipe measures or checks the result, so there is no way to know whether the pickle ever reaches the acidity that would inhibit spoilage organisms.
- "Some time" is not a shelf lifeThe original gives no storage temperature and no keeping limit. Modern practice treats any cooked, sealed, low-acid fish preserve made without measured pH or a validated heat process as unsafe, and a current recipe for soused or pickled fish, eaten within days from the refrigerator, should be used instead.
- What "a moderate oven" meantCassell's gives no temperatures; a moderate oven is usually read today as somewhere around 350F, judged in a coal range by hand and by flour browning. Two hours at that heat is far longer than the fish needs to cook, and was presumably meant to soften the bones and drive the vinegar into the flesh.
- The seasoning is a curing quantity, not a table quantityThe seasoning -- A tablespoon of salt and half a tablespoon of pepper across four fish reads as underseasoned to a modern cook, and it is well short of the salt concentration a safe cured fish product requires.
- Scale and costFour good-sized haddocks is a substantial quantity of fish, filling a deep dish and evidently intended to feed a household over successive cold meals. "9d. each" is nine pence in pre-decimal currency.
Pickled or "soused" fish belongs to a long British tradition of using vinegar and spice to stretch a glut of cheap sea fish, and it survives in recognisable form as soused herring and mackerel. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery is generally placed at the very end of the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth century, a period when railway ice and the east-coast steam trawlers were landing haddock in inland markets in quantities no household could eat fresh, and the answer was to bake it down in vinegar and then pot it under fat, exactly the method used for potted meats, shrimps and salmon on the same shelf. The fat seal was doing what a lid and a boiling-water bath do now, and it worked well enough often enough to be printed in respectable books for a century; the specific hazard of anaerobic storage was slow to be understood, though botulism was traced to a preserved food, salted ham, by van Ermengem in 1895, with sausage poisoning described by Kerner decades earlier.