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Baked Haddock
Clean a haddock, remove the eyes, trim it and pass its tail through the cavity of the eyes, or the tail may be tied to its mouth. Chop finely two ounces of fat bacon and a little green parsley mix these with two ounces of breadcrumbs, a little salt and pepper, a few drops of essence of anchovy, and an egg to make it into a stiff paste. Stuff the fish with the mixture and sew it up. Put one tablespoonful of flour in a basin, work into it one tablespoonful of cold water, pour on one breakfast cupful of boiling water, and mix in one ounce of butter and two tablespoonfuls of essence of anchovy. Pour this into a baking tin, put the fish on it, place the pan in a moderate over and bake for an hour, basting frequently, or until done, without its taking color. It may be served in the baking tin placed in the dish or taken out and placed on a dish; but the fish needs to be handled very carefully or it will break to pieces when moved, thus spoiling its appearance. The sauce can be poured round it. A few skinned shrimps added to the sauce when it is about half cooked are a great improvement, and the dish may be garnished with crayfish tails.
A late-Victorian whole baked fish with an anchovy-scented stuffing and a flour-thickened pan sauce that doubles as basting liquid. Most of the updating needed here is in the timing and in one vanished ingredient.
- The hour in the ovenA whole haddock of 2-3 lb needs roughly 25-35 minutes at 350F rather than a full hour; measure at the thickest point and pull it at 135-140F, when the flesh at the backbone has just turned opaque. The recipe itself allows "or until done"; a full hour would leave the flesh dry and prone to the collapse the recipe warns about.
- "A moderate over"A typographical slip for oven. The book gives no temperatures; a moderate oven is conventionally read as about 350F.
- Essence of anchovyA thin bottled anchovy extract, once sold everywhere and now effectively gone. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest thing: use about half the stated volume, since the paste is far more concentrated and much saltier, and taste the sauce before adding any salt.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is a large cup, roughly 8-10 fl oz. Treat it as one cup of boiling water, added gradually to the flour-and-cold-water slurry so it thickens smoothly.
- Two ounces of breadcrumbsBy weight, which is about one cup of fresh soft crumbs or a scant half cup of dried. Fresh crumbs give a lighter stuffing; if you use dried, expect to need a little more egg to bring it to a stiff paste.
- Fat baconSalt pork or unsmoked streaky bacon rather than modern heavily smoked, sugar-cured supermarket bacon, which will dominate the anchovy. It is there for fat, so chop it fine enough to render into the crumbs.
- The tail through the eye socketsPurely Victorian presentation, curling the fish into a ring. Tying the tail to the mouth achieves the same thing; skipping it entirely costs nothing but the period look.
- HandlingBake on a bed of parchment or a length of doubled foil laid in the tin so you can lift the fish out intact. Sew the cavity with kitchen twine and a trussing needle, and let the fish rest five minutes before moving it.
- Shrimp and garnishAdd peeled shrimp to the sauce only in the last few minutes of baking; whole crayfish tails are a garnish, added at the table. "Half cooked" in the original assumes the long bake, so judge by the shrimp, which need two or three minutes at most.
- YieldA 2-3 lb haddock serves three or four as a main course.
Baked stuffed haddock with anchovy was a staple of English fish cookery long before it reached Oscar Tschirky's kitchen at the Waldorf, and this recipe reads like a direct import: the breakfast cup, the essence of anchovy, the basin for mixing flour and water are all British domestic vocabulary of roughly this period. Bottled anchovy essence was the period's all-purpose savory boost, doing for fish what mushroom ketchup did for meat, and it appears constantly in books of this generation. The trick of passing the tail through the eye sockets belongs to the same tradition of dressing a fish for the table so that it arrives looking deliberate rather than merely cooked; the closing note that the fish must be moved with care or it will break and spoil its appearance is the whole aesthetic of Gilded Age hotel dining in one sentence. Haddock itself was cheap and plentiful in North Atlantic markets then, which is why a luxury hotel cookbook could treat it as an everyday whole-fish dish.