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HADDOCK SOUP (another way)
Take a large fresh haddock, cut off the meat in fillets, and divide these into neat pieces. Put the bones and trimmings into a saucepan with a quart of water, an onion, a carrot, and half a dozen peppercorns, and let them simmer gently for half an hour. Strain the gravy, flour the slices of fish, and fry them in hot lard or dripping till they are brightly browned. Put them into the soup, and season it with salt, cayenne, and a table-spoonful of ketchup. Serve in a soup-tureen. Time, altogether, one hour. Sufficient for two or three persons. Probable cost, 1s.
A quick fish soup built on a stock made from the fish's own frame, with the fillets fried before they go in. Two details carry it: the ketchup is not tomato, and the fried fish should barely see the liquid.
- The ketchupIn an English kitchen of this period "ketchup" means mushroom or walnut ketchup — a thin, dark, salty condiment closer to Worcestershire sauce than to anything in a squeeze bottle. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; a tablespoon of Worcestershire or a teaspoon of good soy is a reasonable stand-in. Tomato ketchup will sweeten the soup and throw it off balance.
- Stock timingHalf an hour is more than most modern cooks give fish bones; twenty minutes at a bare simmer will extract what is useful, and longer cooking is commonly said to leave fish stock bitter and gluey. Skim once as it comes up to heat and do not let it boil hard, or the broth will cloud.
- The quartAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 5 US cups. With bones and vegetables in the pan you will strain off rather less, which is correct for two or three servings.
- Adding the fishPut the browned pieces in at the last moment and give them two to three minutes in the hot broth — just enough to heat through. Longer and the flour coating sloughs off and the fillets go dry and cottony.
- Frying fatLard or beef dripping gives the browning the recipe is after; both are still available and both work. Any neutral oil at a high heat will do the same job. Dry the floured pieces well and do not crowd the pan.
- Cayenne and saltThe stock is unsalted until the end, so season after straining and again after the fish goes in. Cayenne here is a whisper — an eighth of a teaspoon for the whole pot — used for warmth rather than heat.
- Buying the fishA whole haddock of 2–3 lb, filleted with the head and frame kept, is what is wanted. Ask the fishmonger for the bones if you buy fillets alone, and avoid smoked haddock, which would overwhelm the light broth entirely.
- Yield and serviceTwo or three as a first course. Serve it straight from the tureen while the fried fish still has some crispness; it does not reheat well.
Cassell's gives more than one haddock soup — the page heading "(another way)" tells you as much — and haddock was cheap, plentiful and landed all along the North Sea coast; the "probable cost, 1s." tells you this was an everyday dish rather than a company one. The method is a thoroughly Victorian piece of thrift: the frame and trimmings that a modern cook might discard become the whole liquid basis of the soup, while the flesh is fried separately so that it arrives at table browned rather than boiled grey. The bottled ketchups it leans on — mushroom, walnut, oyster — were the standard shortcut to savoury depth in nineteenth-century British kitchens, sold by grocers in stoppered bottles and used much as commercial stock concentrate is now; in a book of this date the word can generally be taken to mean mushroom unless the recipe says otherwise.