Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Fried Fillets of Haddock
Fried Fillets of Haddock
Skin and clean a haddock, cut the flesh into fillets, trimming them into pieces about six inches long, dip them into well beaten egg and then into sifted breadcrumbs. Be sure that they are well covered, plunge them into a fryingpan of boiling fat, and fry to a rich color, turning them over, in order to cook both sides. Take them out, drain, put them on a cloth spread over a dish, and serve with a sauceboatful of Dutch sauce.
Haddock, Maitre d'Hotel Clean a haddock and cut it open at the back on each side of the bone, dust with salt and pepper, dip it in flour, place on a gridiron over a clear fire and cook for about twenty minutes, turning carefully. Put two ounces of maitre d'hotel butter on the back of the fish, place it in the oven to melt the butter, then put the fish on a dish, pour around two more ounces of butter mixed with six tablespoonfuls of ordinary butter melted in a saucepan over the fire and made quite hot.
Two straightforward preparations of a fish that was once the cheapest thing on a New York menu. The main adjustments are naming conventions and heat control.
- Dutch sauceThis is the older English name for hollandaise — egg yolks, butter, lemon or vinegar. Nineteenth-century versions were often thinner and sharper than the modern emulsion, sometimes thickened with a little flour.
- Maitre d'hotel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, then chilled. The recipe uses it twice: two ounces melted over the fish, then a further two ounces beaten into six tablespoons of plain melted butter for the pouring sauce. That is a great deal of butter by current habit; half will not hurt the dish.
- Frying fat"Boiling fat" means fat at frying temperature, 350-375F, not literally boiling. Below that the crumb coating absorbs grease; above it the crust colours before the fillet is through.
- DonenessSix-inch haddock fillets need roughly three to four minutes in the fat. Cook to 145F, or until the flesh separates into flakes under light pressure — haddock is lean and turns dry and cottony within a minute of being overdone.
- The gridironA gridiron over a clear fire is a grill over coals with no flame or smoke. A hot broiler or a ridged pan does the same work. Twenty minutes is for a whole split fish; a bone-in haddock of two to three pounds may need less, so test at fifteen.
- Splitting at the backCutting either side of the backbone opens the fish flat so it cooks evenly and the butter has somewhere to sit. Leave the skin on for grilling — it holds the flesh together on the turn.
- DrainingThe cloth over a dish is the period's version of a rack lined with paper. A wire rack is better still; fillets sitting on a flat cloth steam their undersides soft.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight or number of servings. A haddock of around three pounds would yield enough six-inch pieces for roughly four; the grilled whole fish would serve about the same.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and his cook book was published in 1896. Haddock was a workhorse of the North Atlantic fisheries " landGloucester and Boston landed it in quantity, it was cheap, and it was served fresh, smoked as finnan haddie, or salted. Neither of these preparations is elaborate; egg-and-crumbed and fried, or grilled with a compound butter, were both common treatments of firm white fish in French-trained kitchens of the period. The name "Dutch sauce" for hollandaise persisted in English and American cookbooks well into the twentieth century, and is generally taken as a straight translation of the French, whose own attribution to Holland is traditional rather than documented.