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Findon Haddock in Cream
Remove skin and bones from two and a half pounds fat, smoked Findon haddock, cut in half-inch pieces, plunge in a pint of boiling water for five minutes, remove and drain on a sieve. Place in a small saucepan an ounce butter with an ounce flour and stir briskly while beating for one minute. Pour in a half gill each milk and cream, season with two saltspoons salt, saltspoon cayenne and half saltspoon grated nutmeg, then sharply stir until it comes to a boil. Add fish, cook for five minutes, pour into a deep hot dish and serve.
A plain cream sauce built around Finnan haddie, written for a cook who already knows the fish. Two things need attention before you start: the sauce quantity as printed is very small for the weight of fish, and the blanching step is doing more work than it appears to.
- What Findon haddock isBetter known as Finnan haddie: haddock split, brined and cold-smoked. The name is usually derived from Findon in Aberdeenshire, though Findhorn on the Moray Firth is also claimed. Look for it at a fishmonger or by mail order; it is pale gold, firm and dry to the touch. Bright yellow, wet-looking fillets are dyed and usually lightly smoked at best, and will give a different dish.
- The blanch is a desalting stepFive minutes in boiling water pulls out salt and softens the cure as much as it cooks the fish. Taste a flake after draining before you add any salt to the sauce at all. Traditional cures were far heavier than most modern smoked haddock, so the two saltspoons the recipe calls for will often be too much.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is a quarter pint; on the 16 fl oz pint that makes half a gill 2 fl oz (¼ cup) each of milk and cream, while on the imperial pint it would be 2½ fl oz. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: two saltspoons salt is ½ teaspoon, and the cayenne and nutmeg are ¼ and ⅛ teaspoon.
- The sauce is too scant as writtenFour or five fluid ounces of liquid thickened with an ounce each of butter and flour will seize into paste the moment the fish goes in. For 2½ lb of haddock, figure on at least 1½ to 2 cups of milk and cream together, keeping the same roux, and add it gradually off the heat to avoid lumps.
- Cook the roux, then the sauceOne minute of brisk stirring takes the raw edge off the flour without colouring the butter, which is what you want here; a little longer does no harm. Bring the sauce to a boil to thicken it fully before the fish goes in; after that, keep it just below a simmer.
- Five minutes is the outside limitThe haddock is already cured and has had five minutes in boiling water. Once it is in the sauce it needs only to heat through, two or three minutes, and it should be folded rather than stirred so the half-inch pieces stay whole rather than shredding.
- Yield and servingTwo and a half pounds of fish serves five or six as a main course. Serve it on buttered toast, on split baked potatoes, or over rice; a poached egg on top is a traditional accompaniment.
Finnan haddie takes its name from Findon, a fishing village south of Aberdeen, and the cure is generally traced to the villages of the Aberdeenshire coast in the eighteenth century, where split haddock were dried and smoked over peat or hardwood. By the nineteenth century the fish travelled by rail and steamer well beyond Scotland, and it turns up on British and American hotel breakfast menus throughout the period. Its appearance in a book organised around "The World's Kitchen" reflects how a regional preserved fish had become a standard item of the international hotel repertoire — creamed, curried, or baked, it was reliable, arrived already cured, and could be turned out quickly for a breakfast service. The cream treatment here is the plainest of those versions, and the nutmeg and cayenne are the conventional seasonings of a period white sauce rather than anything Scottish.