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Fresh Haddock Pie

A stuffed haddock baked and served in a pie dish, finished with a gravy made from the fish cuttings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Fresh Haddock Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA sharp oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Wash and dry the haddock.

  2. Make stuffing by mixing bread crumbs, bacon, salt, pepper, herbs, milk, and egg.

Stuff and bake

  1. Fill the fish with the stuffing and sew it up.

  2. Bake the fish until three-quarters done.

Pack and make gravy

  1. Let it cool, then cut and pack it in a pie dish.

  2. Remove the backbone and boil it with fish cuttings to make gravy.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  3. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Pepper + milktop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26,984 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh haddock
Forms the main body of the pie and is the dish's central filling.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and egg to bind the stuffing and keep it moist.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the stuffing as it cooks.
Raw egg
Binds the stuffing so it holds together when cut and packed.
Milk
Moistens the bread crumbs so the stuffing stays tender.

The step that matters

Bake the fish until three-quarters done. Baking only partway lets the fish finish gently later, so it stays moist rather than dry and flaky. Cooking it fully before packing would overcook it when it is reheated or set in the pie.

“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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