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Haddocks, to Keep
Scrape and wash the fish, empty them, open them below the vent so that the blood may be cleared from the backbone. Take out the eyes, and put a little salt in the bodies. Let them lie a few hours, then put a long wooden skewer through the eyes, and hang them in a dry place for a day or two. They may be cooked like dried or Finnan haddocks (see FINDON HADDOCKS). Time, three or four days.
This is a curing method, not a cooking method: raw haddock is lightly salted and then air-dried at room temperature for several days. The technique depends on conditions a Victorian larder had and a modern kitchen does not, and the quantities that would make it safe are simply absent.
- The salt is unmeasured"A little salt in the bodies" gives no brine strength, no salt-to-fish ratio and no curing time beyond "a few hours". Safe salt curing of fish depends on achieving a specific water-phase salt concentration throughout the flesh, which cannot be judged by eye.
- Botulism risk in cured fishClostridium botulinum type E is associated with fish, and the non-proteolytic types can grow without oxygen at refrigeration temperatures. That risk bears chiefly on sealed, packed or vacuum-held cured fish rather than fish hung in open air, but under-salted fish kept for days at ambient temperature is unsafe on other grounds regardless; botulinum toxin cannot be detected by smell or appearance.
- "A dry place" is not a temperatureThe recipe specifies no temperature, no season and no kind of room. A modern house sits at 18-22C, which is within the growth range for spoilage and pathogenic bacteria over the days the fish hangs.
- No smoke, no barrierFindon haddocks were cold-smoked as well as salted, and the smoke contributed both drying and antimicrobial phenols. This method omits it entirely, leaving nothing but a light surface salting between raw fish and open air.
- Insects and surface contaminationHanging split fish uncovered invites blowfly strike and airborne contamination. Traditional drying depended on cold, windy weather and, in salted work, on much heavier salting; a kitchen or garage offers neither.
- Parasites are not addressedParasites -- marine fish commonly carry anisakid nematodes, which are killed by proper freezing or thorough cooking, not by a few hours in salt and a few days on a skewer. The recipe does direct cooking afterwards, which would deal with them, so this matters mainly if the dried fish is eaten without further cooking.
- If you want the resultBuy commercially cold-smoked Finnan haddock, or follow a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority that specifies brine concentration, temperature and holding times. Do not scale or adapt the instructions above.
- What the timing meansThe "three or four days" appears to be total elapsed time from gutting to dried fish rather than a cooking time, though it does not tally exactly with the "few hours" and "day or two" given in the body of the recipe. The fish is still raw at the end of it and would be cooked afterwards, as for Findon haddocks.
Haddock was a cheap and plentiful sea fish on the Scottish east coast, and drying it was one way a glut of it was made to last. The Findon or "Finnan" haddock is traditionally credited to the village of Findon south of Aberdeen (Findhorn in Moray is sometimes claimed instead), and the style is said to have spread through Aberdeen to London tables in the nineteenth century; hard-dried, unsmoked haddocks were separately known as speldings or rizzared haddocks. Skewering the fish through the eye sockets is practical: it lets a row of fish hang from a single stick, as they were hung to dry.