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Haddock, Dried (INGREDIENTS for breakfast dish)
INGREDIENTS for breakfast dish for 4 persons.-1 large thick haddock, 2 bay-leaves, 1 small bunch of savoury herbs, not forgetting parsley, a little butter and pepper; boiling water.
AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Cut up the haddock into square pieces, make a basin hot by means of hot water, which pour out. Lay in the fish with the bay-leaves and herbs; cover with boiling water; put a plate over to keep in the steam, and let it remain for 10 minutes.
Take out the slices, put them in a hot dish, rub over with butter and pepper, and serve.
TIME.-10 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time but best in winter.
Haggis. INGREDIENTS.-A sheep's pluck and the small fat tripe, a sheep's paunch, a teacupful of oatmeal, 2 onions, 1 lb. of beef suet, a dessertspoonful of salt, a teaspoonful of pepper, pint of beef gravy.
AVERAGE COST, 3s.
Well wash and clean the pluck and the tripe. and boil for 1/2 hour with the pipe hanging over the edge of the pot, then remove all the pipe, and skin and mince the meat finely. Add the onions, chopped small, the oatmeal, previously dried in the oven, the suet, chopped finely, the seasoning and the gravy, and mix all well together. Have the paunch, which must be whole, thoroughly cleansed, and put the mixture into it, and sew it up loosely, then tie in a cloth as a pudding, leaving room for swelling, and boil slowly, in plenty of water for 3½ hours. Serve hot in a deep dish or tureen.
TIME.-4 hours.
SEASONABLE in winter.
Two recipes run together here: a breakfast dish of dried haddock steeped in a basin, and a full haggis. Both assume a cook who already knows what a pluck is and what dried haddock tastes like.
- What "dried haddock" meansNot dehydrated stockfish but the cured, lightly smoked haddock sold as finnan haddie or, undyed, as smoked haddock fillet. It is salty on its own account, and the recipe adds no salt of its own. If yours is heavily salted, soak it in cold water for an hour and taste a scrap before deciding on seasoning.
- The basin methodWarming the basin with hot water and then pouring it away is the whole trick: a cold china bowl drops the temperature of the boiling water immediately and the fish poaches at too low a heat. Use a thick heatproof bowl, cover it tightly, and cut the fish into pieces no thicker than an inch so ten minutes is enough. Thick cuts should be poached in a pan instead.
- Cost and yield9d. dates the page more than anything else in it. The haddock dish serves four as written; the haggis, from a whole sheep's paunch, will feed eight to ten with mashed potato and swede.
- Pluck and paunchA pluck is the heart, liver and lungs taken out together, with the windpipe ("the pipe") attached; it is hung over the pot edge so the tubes drain rather than fill. Sheep's lung cannot legally be sold for food in the United States, and paunch and pluck are special-order items from a butcher almost everywhere. Commercially made haggis in an artificial casing is the practical substitute.
- The oatmealUse pinhead or coarse-cut oatmeal, not rolled oats, and dry it in a 300F oven until it smells toasted, about 15 to 20 minutes, stirring once. Rolled oats collapse into paste and the haggis loses its characteristic loose, gritty texture.
- The gravy quantity is garbled"Pint of beef gravy", standing without an article, looks as though a fraction has dropped out. Add it gradually until the mixture is moist and just droppable from a spoon, no wetter.
- Room for swellingThe hinge of the whole dish. Oatmeal absorbs liquid and expands, and a tightly packed, tightly sewn paunch bursts. Fill it no more than two-thirds, sew loosely, and prick the casing once or twice with a needle after the first half hour of boiling.
- Times disagreeThe method says three hours, the TIME line says four. Three hours at a bare simmer cooks it through; the extra hour in the summary probably counted the preliminary half-hour boil of the pluck and the draining and mincing. Keep the water at a shiver, never a rolling boil, or the casing works loose at the seam.
Both dishes belong to the same cold-weather, thrift-minded corner of British cooking, and Mrs Beeton's book carried them alongside each other because the alphabet put them there. Cured haddock reached English breakfast tables in quantity once the railways could move fish south from Scottish and north-eastern ports; the finnan haddie name is generally traced to Findon in Aberdeenshire. Haggis is much older and much more local, a way of cooking the perishable offal of a newly killed sheep immediately, inside the animal's own stomach, with oatmeal to stretch it. By the time this book appeared, Burns's "Address to a Haggis" of 1786 had already made it a ceremonial dish rather than merely a household one, which is why an English cookery compendium of the period includes it at all, filed between haddock and ham as though it were an ordinary winter boil.