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Findon Haddie Savory
(Scotland.) Dip the fish in boiling water, and take out all the bones and skin. Pound the meat in a mortar, add a little pepper, salt, and a spoonful of lemon juice, also 1 ounce of butter and a tablespoonful of cream. Cook and stir until thick and pour over slices of toast buttered and dipped for an instant in hot water. For supper or lunch.
TROUT (as cooked in Geneva.).
Broil the trout, first dipping them in olive oil, lemon juice, and seasoning. Make a sauce of 1/2 pint of consomme, a tablespoonful of claret, a tablespoonful of chopped parsley, and a teaspoonful of anchovy sauce. Cook and strain and pour over the fish.
BAKED SHAD (as cooked in France.).
Butter a large, flat earthenware dish, lay the shad, split open, upon it, and cover with a forcemeat made of the roes, some bread-crumbs, parsley, bayleaf, thyme, butter, and 6 mushrooms, all chopped and mixed together. Sew the fish up and bake for an hour, basting it with 1/2 pint of white stock, seasoned with lemon juice, sherry, onion, and carrot.
BROILED FISH (as cooked in Normandy.).
Clean and split a large fish, such as flounder, bluefish, or mackerel, cover it with a mixture of sweet oil, vinegar, chopped onion, herbs, salt, and pepper. Set in a cold place for an hour, turning it several times. Drain it, dip it in bread-crumbs, then in egg and more crumbs, and broil till brown. Serve with Tartare sauce.
SOLE, a la Normande.
Make a forcemeat of bread, herbs, oysters, and truffles, mushrooms, and 1/4 pound of ham, all cut up and mixed with 1/2 cup of white stock. Stuff the fish with this, squeeze the juice of a lemon over it, dot it with butter and bread-crumbs. Lay it in a dish, pour over it 1/2 pint of white stock, mixed with some parsley, pepper, and salt. Bake 40 minutes, basting often, and serve in the same dish, adding more stock, if too dry.
FISH SALAD (as made in the Tyrol.).
Remove skin and bones and flake 2 cups of cold boiled fish, add 1/2 pound of cold boiled shrimps, cut into dice, mix with 4 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, a little pepper, 1/2 teaspoonful of celery seed, and 2 tablespoonfuls of capers. Stir well and add 1 green pepper, cut up finely and free from seeds, and then enough mayonnaise dressing to make it moist. Serve in a bed of lettuce leaves, with bits of aspic jelly and 2 hard-boiled eggs, sliced and arranged as a garnish.
This page runs six fish dishes together under one heading, each a sketch rather than a full recipe. The Findon haddie savoury is the anchor and the only one that needs much translation; the rest assume a cook who already knows how to handle a whole fish.
- Findon haddie is finnan haddockCold-smoked, lightly salted haddock, usually said to be named for Findon south of Aberdeen (a rival derivation from Findhorn in Moray is also offered), and traditionally sold split on the bone. Modern smoked haddock works directly; avoid the bright yellow dyed fillets, which are wetter and blander. Undyed naturally smoked haddock is the closest match.
- "Dip in boiling water" means poachThe fish is being cooked as well as loosened, not merely rinsed. Cover with just-boiled water off the heat for 4-5 minutes until the flesh flakes, then lift out, skin and bone it. Reserve none of the liquid; it is salty.
- Mortar, or food processorPounding to a paste is the point, and short pulses in a processor do the same work. Stop while a little texture remains, or the mixture turns pasty and gluey.
- The hinge: keep the heat lowButter, cream and pounded fish "cooked and stirred until thick" will split if pushed. Warm gently, stirring, until it holds its shape on the spoon, roughly the consistency of a thick potted spread.
- Toast dipped in hot waterAn old trick to soften the crust so the toast absorbs the mixture rather than sitting under it. An instant is literal, a second or two at most. Many cooks now skip it and simply butter the toast well.
- Quantities and yieldThe recipe gives no fish weight. About 12 oz of smoked haddock with the stated 1 ounce of butter, the tablespoonful of cream and the recipe's unspecified 'spoonful' of lemon juice should make roughly four rounds of toast, a light supper for two.
- Trout, Geneva styleHalf a pint is one US cup of consomme. Reduce it with the claret and anchovy sauce until it coats a spoon before straining, or it will run off the fish. Anchovy sauce is already salty, so season the trout lightly.
- Baked shadAn hour is a long bake for a modern fillet; the instruction assumes a whole 3-4 lb split shad, sewn shut around the forcemeat, basting throughout. Shad roe is seasonal and increasingly hard to source, and some Atlantic shad fisheries are now closed or restricted, so check local availability before planning the dish.
- The Normandy marinade"Set in a cold place for an hour" means the refrigerator. Drain the fish thoroughly and pat it dry before the crumb-egg-crumb coating, or the breading will slide off under the broiler.
- Sole a la NormandeThe recipe gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits it, and it is worth checking at 25 minutes rather than waiting the stated 40. A stuffed flatfish is done when the flesh at the thickest point flakes and reads 145F. Truffle is optional here, and an extra handful of mushrooms cooked down hard carries the forcemeat perfectly well.
- Tyrol fish saladDressed with vinegar, capers and mayonnaise, this is meant to be eaten cold and soon. Keep it refrigerated and serve within a day; cooked fish and shrimp held at room temperature on a lettuce bed do not improve.
Finnan haddock takes its name from Findon, a fishing village south of Aberdeen, where haddock were traditionally split, brined and cold-smoked over peat; the fish was carried by rail to London and Edinburgh through the nineteenth century and became a staple of the British breakfast and supper table. Pounding cooked fish with butter and cream into a paste for toast belongs to the same family as potted fish and fish pastes, a way of stretching a small quantity of smoked fish across a household. What is striking about this page is the company the Scottish dish keeps: trout "as cooked in Geneva", shad "as cooked in France", fish "as cooked in Normandy". On the evidence of this page at least, the book seems to belong to a genre of turn-of-the-century American and British collections that gathered dishes from travel abroad, and the attributions are often loose regional labels rather than documented local practice. The presence of shad and bluefish among them shows the compiler adapting European methods to what an American market actually sold.