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Boiled Haddock with Lobster Sauce
Wash the fish, then place it in a fishkettle with boiling water to cover, add one tablespoonful of salt, and boil gently for about half an hour. Pick out the flesh of a small lobster and cut it into little pieces; put the coral in a mortar with one ounce of butter, and pound it. Place three ounces of butter in a small saucepan, with two tablespoonfuls of flour, and mix together over the fire until well incorporated; then put in the pounded coral, and season with two tablespoonfuls of lemon juice and a small quantity of cayenne. Pour in gradually one pint of boiling water, and stir it over the fire for ten minutes. Strain the sauce, return it to the saucepan, put in the pieces of lobster, and boil it up once. When cooked drain the fish, being careful not to break it; place it on a hot dish, baste with a little of the sauce, and serve the balance in sauceboat.
A late-Victorian hotel standard: a whole white fish poached plain, dressed with a roux sauce enriched by lobster coral. Two things need translating — the cooking time and the coral.
- Do not boil the fishA gentle poach at 170-180F will do, and half an hour is longer than a haddock of ordinary size needs. Reckon about 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point; the flesh should just part from the bone. The recipe gives no weight, but a whole haddock of 3-4 lb would land somewhere between 15 and 25 minutes.
- The fishkettleA long oval pan with a perforated lift-out rack, which is how the fish came out whole. A deep roasting pan works if you sling the fish in doubled cheesecloth and lift by the ends, or wrap it in a cloth and set it on a rack.
- Butter and flour weightsThree ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons; the extra ounce pounded with the coral is 2 tablespoons more. Two tablespoons of flour to 6 tablespoons of butter is a very rich roux — it thickens a pint loosely, which is what a basting sauce wants.
- CoralCoral is the roe, found only in hen lobsters and only when they are carrying it. It is dark green raw and turns scarlet with heat, which is where the sauce gets its colour. If your lobster has none, the sauce still works; a little paprika will stand in for some of the colour, though not for the coral's flavour.
- Use stock, not waterThe recipe calls for plain boiling water. Simmer the lobster shells for 20 minutes and use that liquid, or a light fish stock, and the sauce gains everything the water leaves out.
- StrainingStrain before the lobster meat goes in, as written — the point is to catch the coral's grit and any shell fragments. Add the meat afterward and let it heat through only; a hard boil on picked lobster tightens it.
- Cayenne and lemon"A small quantity" of cayenne means a pinch or two, enough to warm the sauce, not to be tasted as heat. Two tablespoons of lemon juice is assertive; add half, taste, then finish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no fish weight; a haddock of 3-4 lb with a pint of sauce would serve about six as a main course. The sauce is best made while the fish poaches, as it will skin over on standing.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen with strong French and English bones. Boiled fish with a shellfish sauce is the English half of that inheritance: lobster sauce over boiled turbot, cod or haddock was a fixture of nineteenth-century British dining, and coral was prized as much for the scarlet it gave a white sauce as for its taste. Haddock itself was cheap and abundant on the North Atlantic banks in this period, landed in quantity at Boston and Gloucester, which made it the sensible carrier for an expensive sauce — the lobster is doing the work, and the fish is the plate it arrives on. The technique of pounding coral with butter in a mortar to make a coloured compound is standard beurre de homard, and it predates the Waldorf by well over a century.