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Creamed Finnan-Haddie
Put Finnan-haddie in a baking pan, cover with cold water. Bring water to boiling point slowly. Cook over low fire half an hour. Drain and rinse, separate fish in flakes. Make white sauce No. II, add flaked fish and one or two hard boiled eggs sliced.
A cold-water start draws out salt and smoke, which is the whole point of the first step — but half an hour of cooking belongs to an era of harder, drier cure than anything sold today.
- What finnan haddie isCold-smoked haddock, traditionally split and hung over peat or hardwood, sold pale gold and firm. Modern packs are lightly cured and often dyed; look for undyed smoked haddock fillets, about 1 to 1 1/4 lb for this dish. Avoid the bright orange dyed sort if you want the flavour rather than the colour.
- Cut the cooking timeThirty minutes will reduce present-day fillets to cotton wool. Bring the water barely to a simmer, cut the heat, and let the fish stand 8 to 10 minutes until it flakes at the thickest point. Older, heavily salted fish genuinely needed the long soak; today's does not.
- Poach in milk insteadIf you want more from the step, poach in milk rather than water and use that milk for the sauce. The book's water method is a desalting soak first and a cooking method second.
- White sauce No. IIMost likely the medium white sauce of period cookbooks, on the order of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon; follow the book's own numbered recipe where it is given. About two cups of sauce suits a pound of fish.
- SaltAdd none until the fish is folded in and you have tasted. Smoked haddock carries plenty, and the salt level of the cure is unpredictable.
- Seasoning that helpsWhite pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, and a spoonful of chopped parsley are period-appropriate and keep the dish from tasting flat. A little of the poaching liquid loosens the sauce if it stiffens.
- Yield and servingServes four over toast points, split baked potatoes, or rice. It was a breakfast and supper dish as much as a dinner one.
Finnan haddie is usually said to take its name from Findon, a fishing village south of Aberdeen, and the Scots word for haddock, though Findhorn on the Moray Firth is a long-standing rival claim; the cure is generally traced to that stretch of the north-east Scottish coast, where haddock were split and cold-smoked over smouldering peat or wood. Because the smoking preserved as well as flavoured, cured haddock travelled well and became a fixture of North American breakfast and chafing-dish cookery in the late nineteenth century, appearing creamed, in scallops, and in kedgeree.