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Fried Fresh Haddock, Tartare Sauce
Remove skin and bone from a two-pound piece of fresh haddock, then cut six equal thin filets. Season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, then roll in flour, dip in beaten egg and roll in bread crumbs, arrange in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat ten minutes. Lift up, sprinkle over a very little salt, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens, and serve with a tartare sauce separately. MULLIGATAWNEY, MAH HLA BYAW (of Burmah) Cut in small square pieces one carrot, one green pepper, one onion, one branch celery, one ounce lean raw ham and half a boned raw fowl. Place these in a large saucepan with one and a half tablespoons melted butter and gently brown ten minutes; add one good tablespoon curry powder. Stir well and brown five minutes. Moisten with one and a half quarts broth and one and a half quarts hot water. Season with a good teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, then add bones of the half fowl; slowly simmer one and a half hours, skimming off fat once in a while; add milk and grated white part of two fresh cocoanuts, mix a little and cook five minutes, then add half ounce good butter; mix well, pour soup into a soup tureen and serve with boiled rice separately.
Two dishes run together in the original text: a plain deep-fried haddock and a full Anglo-Indian mulligatawny. Neither is difficult, but both carry timings that belong to a coal range rather than a modern stove.
- "Boiling fat" is 350-375FFat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble furiously the moment food enters. Use a thermometer and hold 365F, frying the fillets two or three at a time so the temperature does not crash.
- Ten minutes will ruin the haddockThin breaded fillets cut from a two-pound piece need about three to four minutes to reach golden brown, and haddock is done the instant it flakes. The longer time reflects thicker cuts and unreliable heat; judge by colour and flake, not the clock.
- Drain, do not smotherThe folded napkin on the platter was the standard period presentation, and it did soak up some grease. Rest the fillets on paper or a rack so the crumb stays crisp, then transfer to the serving dish.
- The tartare sauce is assumedThe recipe supplies no sauce; it is given elsewhere in the book or taken as known. The standard period formula is mayonnaise with chopped capers, gherkins, shallot and parsley. Make it in advance and keep it cold.
- Half a boned raw fowlA dressed fowl of the period was often in the region of 3-5 lb, so half of one boned out gives something like 1 to 1.5 lb of meat. A pound of boneless chicken thigh plus a carcass or a few wings for the bones does the same work.
- Bloom the curry powder, but watch itThe five minutes of browning after the curry powder goes in is the step that separates this from a soup tasting of raw spice. Keep the heat gentle and stir constantly; scorched curry powder turns the whole pot bitter.
- Coconut"Milk and grated white part of two fresh cocoanuts" most likely means the liquid and the flesh from inside the nuts rather than canned coconut milk, though the phrasing is ambiguous. Roughly two 14-oz cans of coconut milk stand in; add them at the end as instructed, since a hard boil after they go in may split the soup.
- YieldThree quarts of liquid before the coconut goes in makes a very large pot, ten to twelve servings. The haddock, as written, serves six.
Mulligatawny takes its name from the Tamil milagu-tannir, pepper water, a thin spiced broth of southern India that British households in the subcontinent thickened with meat, rice and, later, curry powder until it became a soup in the European sense. By the nineteenth century it was thoroughly Anglo-Indian and a familiar sight in English and American cookbooks, usually with chicken and rice served alongside. The Burmese attribution here, "Mah Hla Byaw (of Burmah)," looks like the sort of national or personal tag that fills out Filippini's The International Cook Book as a survey of the world's tables; Burma was administered as part of British India at the time, so the label is plausible enough as a regional variant, though the coconut and curry powder place it squarely in the colonial kitchen rather than any village one. The haddock preceding it is the other half of the book's method: a plainly fried North Atlantic fish dressed on a napkin, the standard hotel presentation of the period.