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Pepper, Salt, Nutmeg (One gill of Cream)
One gill of Cream.
A dried Haddock. Three Eggs. Scald and bake the haddock, take half a pound of the meat free from skin and bones, pound it in a mortar with one ounce of butter, rub this through a hair-sieve, then put it into a basin, add the yolks of eggs one by one and mix well, stir in the cream whipped, a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg.
Whip the whites of eggs to a stiff froth and stir in very lightly. Pour this mixture into a Ramequin case and bake about ten minutes. Serve very hot.
A small haddock soufflé baked in individual cases, from the savoury course of a late-Victorian dinner. The printed text has been cut off at the head, so the egg count and part of the ingredient list are missing — read the method carefully before starting.
- The recipe is incompleteThe title is a stray fragment of an ingredient list, and no number of eggs is given. For half a pound of cooked fish and a gill of cream, three yolks and three or four whites would be a plausible proportion, but the original does not say so.
- A gillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, a quarter of an imperial pint — about two-thirds of a US cup, not half a cup. British cookery books of this date normally mean the imperial measure.
- Which haddock"Scald and bake" suggests smoked haddock, which was often soaked or scalded to draw out salt and smoke before cooking. Finnan haddie or any undyed smoked fillet gives that flavour; fresh haddock will taste milder by comparison. Allow appreciably more than half a pound of whole fish to yield half a pound of picked meat.
- Ramequin caseIndividual ramekins, or the stiff fluted paper cases that were sold for the purpose. Butter them well and fill to about three-quarters. Modern ramekins of 4 fl oz will take four to six portions from this quantity.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. For a soufflé mixture in small cases, around 400°F is a reasonable modern equivalent; ten minutes suits 4 fl oz cases and would be short for anything larger.
- Whipped cream, then whitesThe cream is whipped before it goes in, which is what keeps the mixture light without flour. Fold the whites in with a light hand and bake at once — the mixture will not stand while the oven comes up.
- SievingPounding in a mortar and rubbing through a hair sieve is what a food processor does in twenty seconds. Sieve afterwards anyway if you want the texture the recipe is aiming at; smoked haddock hides fine bones.
- ServingAs a savoury this would stretch to several small portions at the end of a long dinner, and fewer as a first course. It will begin to fall soon after leaving the oven, hence "serve very hot."
The savoury was the last course of the formal British dinner, served after the sweet and before dessert — a small, sharply seasoned, often hot mouthful, with anchovy, cheese, marrow or smoked fish doing most of the work. Smoked haddock was the workhorse of the genre: cheap, strongly flavoured, and available inland by rail from the Scottish curing towns, with the name "finnan" often traced to Findon near Aberdeen, though Findhorn is also claimed. Baking it into a soufflé mixture in ramekin cases is a French technique applied to a thoroughly British ingredient, which is exactly what "high class cookery" meant in the training schools of the period: the vocabulary and method of the professional French kitchen, taught to cooks who would be feeding households on haddock and cream. The course itself went into decline after the First World War, persisting in reduced form through the interwar years, though its dishes migrated to the first-course and supper end of the menu, where this one still sits comfortably.