Finnan Haddie
Soak fish in cold water for three-quarters of an hour, then lay in boiling water for five minutes. Wipe very dry, rub butter and lemon juice into the fish and broil over a clear fire for fifteen minutes. Serve with a hot butter sauce.
A short set of instructions that assumes a whole hard-smoked, heavily salted haddock split on the bone — a very different object from the pale, wet-cured fillets sold as smoked haddock today. Adjust the soaking and the timing to the fish you actually have.
- What the fish wasTraditional finnan haddie was split, brined and cold-smoked until firm and quite salty, keeping for days without refrigeration. Modern smoked haddock is lightly cured and often dyed; if yours is a supple, mild fillet, cut the soak to 15 minutes or skip it entirely, or the flesh will waterlog.
- The soak and the scaldThree-quarters of an hour in cold water draws out salt; the five minutes in boiling water would help loosen the skin and begin setting the flesh. Neither step is meant to cook the fish through — both are there to tame a hard cure.
- Broiling timeFifteen minutes suits a thick fish on the bone set some distance from coals. Under a modern gas or electric broiler, a fillet about an inch thick needs roughly 5 to 8 minutes total, until it flakes at the thickest point. Watch it rather than timing it.
- "A clear fire"Means coals burned down past flame and smoke, so nothing sooty settles on the fish. The equivalent is a preheated broiler with the rack about four inches from the element, or a grill over settled charcoal.
- Rub butter and lemon into the fishSoftened, not melted, butter worked into the cut surface with the lemon juice. It bastes the fish as it broils and is the only real seasoning here beyond the smoke and residual salt — taste before adding any more salt to the sauce.
- Hot butter sauceAt this date a 'hot butter sauce' for fish most often meant drawn butter: butter melted with a little flour and hot water or fish liquor, seasoned with lemon and pepper. Melted butter with lemon serves the same purpose.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a whole finnan haddie will feed two or three. Serve with boiled potatoes, or with a poached egg on top, a common Scottish treatment.
Finnan haddie is usually said to take its name from Findon, a fishing village south of Aberdeen, though the Moray village of Findhorn has also been claimed; the fish is generally traced to the Aberdeenshire coast, where haddock were split, salted and cold-smoked — traditionally over peat, later often over hardwood — as a way of holding a glut of the catch. It reached London and then American tables through the nineteenth-century rail and steamship trade, and by the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911 it was a familiar breakfast and supper fish in East Coast markets, sold as a cured commodity rather than something a household made. That is why the recipe is so brief: the cook is not being taught to smoke fish, only to freshen an already-preserved one and get it hot. Soaking and then scalding was common handling for hard-cured fish in this period.