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Haddock a la Cardinal
Take some fillets of haddock, or cod or hake, and poach them gently in milk and water. Meanwhile, prepare a good white sauce, and in another pan a thick tomato sauce, highly seasoned, colored with cochineal if need be, and as thick as a good cream. Lay the fillets when cooked one each on a plate, put some of the white sauce round it, and along the top put the tomato sauce which must not run down. A sprig of chervil is to be placed at each end of the fillet.
A plated fish dish that depends entirely on the two sauces holding their positions. Everything else is straightforward poaching.
- The hinge: sauce consistencyThe tomato sauce has to be thick enough to sit in a stripe along the fillet without bleeding into the white sauce. Reduce it hard, and if it still slackens, stir in a small amount of thick béchamel or a little tomato paste rather than thinning it with more liquid.
- Poaching liquid and timeThe recipe says only 'milk and water' and gives no proportions; a roughly half-and-half mix is the usual reading. Keep it at a bare tremble rather than a simmer. Haddock fillets of about an inch take roughly 6 to 8 minutes and are done when the flakes just separate.
- "A good white sauce"Most likely a béchamel: roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk, cooked out until it no longer tastes of raw flour. Using some of the strained poaching milk improves it.
- CochinealA red colorant made from dried scale insects, still sold as carmine or E120. It is optional here and modern tomato concentrate gives plenty of colour; note that carmine is not vegetarian and is a recognised allergen for a small number of people.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh and it wilts within a day or two. Flat-leaf parsley or a few tarragon leaves stand in; dried chervil contributes nothing and can be left out.
- Substitute fishCod and hake are named in the original and both work. Pollock or ling are closer in texture to the haddock than salmon or any oily fish would be.
- Yield and serviceWritten as a plated dish, one fillet per person, so scale by the number at the table. Both sauces need to be hot at the moment of assembly, which means making them before the fish goes into the pan.
The name follows the old French kitchen convention by which \a a red sauc", is said to derive from the scarlet of a cardinal's robes; in classical practice that colour came from lobster or crayfish butter, and the tomato-and-cochineal version here is a plainer household route to the same effect. The Belgian Cook Book is generally described as having been compiled during the First World War, with Belgian refugees in Britain contributing dishes from home and proceeds going to relief funds, and it is worth noticing how many of its entries lean on white sauce and a few pantry seasonings rather than the shellfish garnishes a restaurant would have used. The recipe treats haddock, cod and hake as interchangeable without comment.