Haddock, Boiled
INGREDIENTS. -Sufficient water to cover the fish; 1/4 lb. of salt to each gallon of water. AVERAGE Cost, 6d. each.
Scrape the fish, take out the inside, wash it thoroughly, and lay it in a kettle, with enougn water to cover it, and salt in the HADDOCK. hour; small, will cook them. Serve with plain melted butter, or anchovy sauce.
TIME.-Large haddock, hour, or rather less.
SEASONABLE from August to February.
A plain salt-water poach for a whole haddock, of the kind that assumed a long fish kettle and a fishmonger who cleaned nothing for you. The method still works; the timings do not.
- Poach, do not boilBring the salted water to a bare shiver — surface trembling, no rolling bubbles — and hold it there. A true boil tears the skin and squeezes the flakes apart before the centre is done.
- The salt ratioA quarter pound of salt to the gallon is about 115 g to 4.5 litres, roughly a 2.5 per cent brine. That is deliberate: it seasons the flesh and firms it. Do not reduce it to a pinch.
- Real cooking timeWhole haddock needs about 8 to 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the shoulder, so 12 to 18 minutes for a 2-3 lb fish. Cook to 145F at the thickest part, where the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone.
- The vesselA fish kettle with a lifting trivet is the traditional tool. Failing that, use a roasting pan across two burners and lower the fish on a sling of doubled cheesecloth so you can lift it out whole.
- "Melted butter"In Beeton this means a flour-thickened butter sauce: butter and a little flour cooked together, let down with water or the poaching liquor and finished with more butter. It is not simply butter melted in a pan.
- Anchovy sauceThe same base with anchovy essence or two or three mashed anchovy fillets stirred in. Salted anchovies in oil work; add them at the end and taste before salting further.
- Seasonable August to FebruaryA note about a market without refrigeration and about spawning condition, not a rule for a modern fishmonger. Buy on firmness, clear eyes and clean smell instead.
- YieldA 2-3 lb haddock serves three to four with potatoes. Cooked and skinned leftovers are the classic base for fish cakes or kedgeree the next day.
Haddock was the everyday white fish of Victorian Britain — cheaper than turbot or salmon, landed in quantity along the North Sea coast, and priced here at sixpence a fish, which put it within reach of a modest household. Boiling whole in salted water was the default treatment for any large fresh fish in this period: it needed no oven, produced a dish that could be sent to table on a napkin with a sauceboat, and left the cook free to make the sauce, which was where the seasoning and the interest actually lay. The alternative fate of haddock, then as now, was the smokehouse; the Finnan — whose name is traditionally traced to Findon in Aberdeenshire, though Findhorn in Moray is also claimed — and the Arbroath smokie carried the fish far inland, while the fresh fish was eaten near the ports. Melted butter and anchovy sauce were the two standard accompaniments in nineteenth-century English cookery, anchovy essence supplying the savoury depth that a plainly poached fish lacks.