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Haddock Au Gratin
I haddock weighing 4 lbs. 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter Salt and pepper 2 lemons 4 ozs. (1/2 cup) melted butter I haddock weighing 4 lbs. 1/2 cupful grated Parmesan cheese 2 tablespoonfuls bread crumbs buttered 1 tablespoonful potato flour 1 gill (1/2 cup) thick cream Boil the haddock in boiling salted water with the two ounces of butter, seasoning of salt and pepper, and the strained juice of one lemon.
When it is ready remove the skin, put the fish into a buttered gratin dish, pour over it the melted butter, and sprinkle over it a little red pepper and lemon juice. Cover it with the cheese and the buttered bread crumbs and put in a hot oven to brown.
Mix the potato flour with the cream, make hot, and pour over the fish just before sending to table.
Garnish with a thinly sliced lemon.
A straightforward poach-and-gratin, printed with a duplicated ingredient line and a poaching step that will wreck the fish if taken literally. The points below sort out both.
- The duplicated haddockThe ingredient list names "1 haddock weighing 4 lbs." twice, evidently a typesetting slip. One fish is intended, about 4 lb whole, which will give somewhere near 2 lb of skinned flesh.
- Do not actually boil itThe hinge of the dish. Haddock held at a rolling boil turns cottony and falls apart before it can be lifted into the gratin dish. Bring the seasoned water to a boil, slide the fish in, take it straight off the heat or down to a bare shiver, and let it stand until the flesh just parts, roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness.
- "A hot oven"425-450F. The fish is already cooked; the oven is only browning cheese and crumbs, so 8-10 minutes near the top is enough.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the original helpfully glosses. Period gills vary between imperial and US measure, but the author's own conversion settles it here.
- Potato flourPotato starch, sold under that name today. It thickens at a lower temperature than wheat flour and thins out if boiled hard, so warm the cream and starch together only until it coats a spoon.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not sweet peppers. A pinch is the intended quantity.
- Buttered bread crumbsFresh crumbs tossed in melted butter until coated, not dry packaged crumbs. They should be added at the same time as the cheese so both colour together.
- The cream at tablePouring the hot cream over a browned crust immediately before serving softens it. Serve the cream around the edge of the dish, or bring it separately, if you want the gratin to stay crisp.
- YieldA 4 lb haddock treated this way will serve about six as a main course, four generously. The juice of the first lemon goes into the poaching water; the second supplies the juice sprinkled over the fish and the slices for garnish.
Books of this kind appeared in quantity in a period when fireproof earthenware and glazed casseroles were coming into use for food sent to table in the vessel it was cooked in. That change explains the shape of this recipe: the fish is poached in a pan, but everything after that happens in a buttered gratin dish handsome enough to serve from. The treatment itself is French in ancestry - au gratin means simply the browned crust, from the same root as gratter, to scrape, originally the crisp scrapings left in the dish. Parmesan is one of the cheeses used for such crusts, and haddock one of the white fish put under one.