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Broiled Fresh Haddock
Procure three fresh haddock steaks of three-quarters of a pound each. Mix on a plate a tablespoon oil with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, then repeatedly turn steaks in the seasoning. Arrange on the broiler and broil six minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish, spread a maitre d'hotel butter over the steaks, decorate with six quarters lemon and serve.
A plain grilled fish course that depends almost entirely on the thickness of the cut and the heat of the broiler. Twelve minutes total is long for haddock unless the steaks are genuinely thick.
- The cutHaddock "steaks" here are cross-sections of a large fish, cut through the bone, roughly an inch to an inch and a half thick at three-quarters of a pound each. Supermarket haddock is almost always a boneless fillet, which is thinner and will need considerably less time; buy the thickest tail-free portion you can find.
- TimingSix minutes a side suits a thick bone-in steak under a coal or gas broiler that is not fiercely hot. A modern fillet of half that thickness is done in about four to five minutes a side, or when the flesh flakes and reads 145F at the centre. Haddock is lean and turns dry and cottony quickly.
- The broilerPreheat the element for a full ten minutes and set the rack so the fish sits three to four inches beneath it. Oil the grid, not just the fish, or the skin side will weld to it. Thick bone-in steaks can be turned once; thin fillets are better left unturned.
- Maitre d'hotel butterThe book assumes you know it: softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, chilled and sliced onto the hot fish. Reckon 3 to 4 oz of butter for three steaks, with about two tablespoons parsley and the juice of half a lemon.
- SeasoningA tablespoon of oil for three steaks is barely a film. That is intentional for broiling, but be generous enough that no dry patch is left exposed to the element. White pepper is used so no black flecks show on pale fish; black pepper works and simply looks different.
- YieldThree steaks of twelve ounces each serve three generously, or more if the fish is one course among several. The recipe calls for six lemon quarters, two per steak.
Haddock was the everyday white fish of the North Atlantic, cheap and abundant on both sides of it. Selling it in bone-in steaks, rather than as fillets, was normal when fish came whole to the shop and the fishmonger cut to order; the round steak holds together on a broiler grid far better than a fillet does, which is why the method reads so casually here. Maitre d'hotel butter, the parsley-and-lemon compound that finishes the dish, is one of the small French conventions that ran straight through Anglo-American hotel cooking of the period, and its appearance here reflects how thoroughly restaurant French had become the default grammar of a grilled fish course.