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Boiled Haddock Sausages

Boiled haddock sausages served with a brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Haddock and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 200 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Boiled Haddock Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sausages

  1. Pound the haddocks until smooth.

  2. Boil the same quantity of bread and milk as fish with a little parsley.

  3. Mix the boiled mixture with the fish and rub it through a sieve.

  4. Add 2 eggs, 1 yolk, salt, and pepper. Stir well.

  5. Fold in the beaten white of the third egg.

  6. Shape the mixture into small sausages.

  7. Dust the sausages with flour.

  8. Boil the sausages in salted water for 15 minutes.

Make the brown sauce

  1. Boil the haddock heads, fins, and bones in 1½ pints of water with parsley, onion, salt, pepper, and toasted bread.

  2. Continue boiling for nearly an hour.

  3. Strain the broth.

  4. Thicken the broth with flour and butter.

  5. Add catsup, soy sauce, and cayenne to the sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Haddock + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Haddocks
Provide the main body of the sausage mixture and its flavour.
Bread
Boiled with milk to add moisture and body to the fish mixture.
Milk
Softens the boiled bread so it blends smoothly into the fish.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help it set when cooked.
Flour
Dusts the sausages so their outside stays dry and lightly firm; thickens the sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and, with flour, helps thicken it smoothly.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg white. Folding keeps the whites' trapped air in the mixture so the sausages stay lighter. Stirring or beating again would deflate it and make them dense.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (haddock, bread, milk, egg, pepper, flour, sauce):

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Turmericfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against haddock, bread, milk, egg, pepper, flour, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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