Skip to main content
Main

Haddock, Boiled

Boiled haddock served with melted butter, anchovy sauce, and parsley garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Haddock, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Wash the fish thoroughly and scrape off the scales.

  2. Empty the fish and wipe the inside.

  3. Fasten the tail in the mouth with a skewer.

Poach

  1. Dissolve 2 ounces of salt in ½ gallon of water.

  2. Bring the salted water to a boil.

  3. Remove the scum carefully, then simmer gently.

  4. Cook until the eyes of the fish start and the flesh leaves the bone easily.

Serve

  1. Serve on a napkin, garnished with parsley, and provide melted butter and anchovy 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. Anchovy + saucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Haddock + anchovytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together75 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Parsley + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,702 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Haddock
Provides the main flesh, which firms and flakes as it cooks in the salted water.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the cooking water so the fish is lightly flavoured as it poaches.

The step that matters

Remove the scum carefully, then simmer gently. Scum is coagulated protein and impurities that rise as the water heats. Skimming it keeps the broth clear, and a gentle simmer avoids a hard boil that would break up the delicate flesh.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (haddock, butter, anchovy, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against haddock, butter, anchovy, 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes