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SAUCE, FISH AND (a Scotch recipe)
Take a sufficient number of fresh haddocks, clean them, and cut off the heads, tails, and fins. Boil the latter thoroughly to make stock. When done, strain it, and take the liquid part, adding a little flour mixed with cold water, butter, salt, and some chopped parsley, and pour it over the fish, which has been previously cut into pieces. Boil the whole till sufficiently cooked. The result is said to be much more savoury than if the fish are simply boiled in water.
A frugal one-pot dish in which the fish is poached in a stock made from its own trimmings. The recipe gives no quantities at all, so the proportions below are a working starting point rather than a correction of the original.
- "The latter" means the trimmingsThe heads, tails and fins are what go into the stock pot, not the cleaned bodies. Remove the gills from the heads first, or the stock turns bitter and cloudy.
- A workable scaleTwo whole haddocks of about 1 lb each, filleted or cut into thick steaks, will serve two to three people. Their trimmings simmered in roughly 3 cups of water for 20 minutes give ample stock; fish bones give up everything they have quickly and turn glutinous and dull if boiled longer.
- The thickening"A little flour mixed with cold water" is a slurry. About 1 tablespoon flour whisked smooth into 2 tablespoons cold water per 2 cups of strained stock gives a lightly thickened sauce; use more if you want it to coat a spoon. Bring the stock to a simmer, whisk the slurry in, and cook it two or three minutes to lose the raw-flour taste before the fish goes near it.
- Do not boil the fishThis is the hinge. "Boil the whole till sufficiently cooked" will shred haddock into threads. Bring the thickened stock to a bare shiver, slide in the pieces, and hold them there 5 to 8 minutes depending on thickness, until the flesh is opaque and parts easily (on steaks, cleanly from the bone).
- Butter and parsleyRoughly 2 tablespoons butter and a generous handful of chopped parsley for the quantity above. Add the parsley at the very end so it stays green, and swirl the butter in off the heat rather than boiling it into the sauce.
- Salt and smoked fishSeason the stock, not just the finished dish, and taste before the fish goes in. If you substitute smoked haddock, which is the other Scottish habit, cut the salt back sharply and expect the stock to carry the smoke through the whole pot.
- ServingThis wants boiled floury potatoes and bread to take up the sauce. Nothing else is needed.
Cassell's collected this under a Scotch heading; the east-coast fishing towns of Scotland were a major centre of the British haddock fishery through the nineteenth century - the Moray Firth, Aberdeen and the villages of Fife landed fish for the industrial cities, fresh, salted or cured in the smoke that gave us Finnan haddie and Arbroath smokies. The method here suggests a fishing household rather than a grand kitchen. Where a professional kitchen would more likely have poached the fish in a court bouillon and served it under a separately made sauce, this recipe makes the stock, the sauce and the dish in one pot, out of parts that would otherwise be thrown away. The closing line, that the result "is said to be much more savoury" than plain boiled fish, is the whole argument for it: the flavour a fish loses to the water is put straight back on the plate.