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Boiled Haddock
Clean and boil as directed in Ways of Cooking Fish. Remove to a hot platter, garnish with slices of " hard-boiled " eggs and parsley, and serve with Egg Sauce. A thick piece of halibut may be boiled and served in the same way.
A cross-referenced recipe of the kind Farmer used constantly: the technique lives elsewhere in the book, and this entry supplies only the finish. Here is what the missing half assumed.
- "Boil" means poach"Boil" here means gentle cooking rather than a hard boil. Water at a rolling boil breaks the flakes apart and drives out gelatin; the fish is better held at or just below a simmer, which is what the cross-referenced fish directions intend by slow cooking.
- The wrappingFarmer's method has the fish tied in cheesecloth, or laid on a rack, so it can be lifted whole from the kettle. A large fillet or a thick cut of haddock will otherwise collapse when you try to move it to the platter. Cheesecloth and kitchen twine still do the job.
- The poaching liquidThe book's fish directions call for salted water with vinegar or lemon juice added, which firms the surface and keeps the flesh white; the proportion is given in the cross-referenced section, not here. Court bouillon with onion, bay and peppercorns is a better-tasting modern equivalent.
- TimingRoughly six to ten minutes per pound for a thick piece, but doneness is what matters: the flesh should just separate into flakes and read about 140F at the center. Haddock is lean and goes from done to dry in a couple of minutes.
- Egg SauceElsewhere in the book this is a plain white sauce -- butter, flour, milk, salt, pepper -- with coarsely chopped hard-boiled egg stirred in at the end. Roughly two eggs to a cup of sauce, added off the heat so the whites do not toughen.
- The halibut variationA thick halibut steak is denser and takes a little longer per pound than haddock, and it dries out faster once past done. Pull it at the same internal temperature.
- YieldFigure six to eight ounces of raw fish per person; a three-pound piece serves six with sauce and potatoes.
Boiled fish with egg sauce is an English and Scottish inheritance that New England took up, and it appears in Fannie Farmer's book as the plainest respectable way to put a whole fresh fish on a table. Haddock was the everyday groundfish of the Massachusetts coast -- landed in enormous quantity off the Grand Banks and Georges Bank, cheaper than cod, and smoked into finnan haddie when it was not sold fresh. The garnish of sliced hard-boiled egg and parsley, with more chopped egg suspended in the white sauce, is the standard nineteenth-century dressing for pale boiled fish: it supplies color and richness that the fish itself, cooked in water, does not have. Her own directions elsewhere insist that eggs be cooked below boiling.