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Haddock, Boiled, with Egg Sauce

A boiled haddock stuffed with suet, breadcrumbs, herbs, and egg, served with a creamy egg yolk and butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Haddock, Boiled, with Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Mix the beef suet, bread crumbs, parsley, thyme, shallot, pepper, salt, and nutmeg in a bowl, then add the raw egg and combine well.

  2. Stuff the haddock with the mixture.

Truss and boil the fish

  1. Sew the stuffed haddock up with strong thread.

  2. Truss the fish in the shape of the letter 'S'.

  3. Boil the trussed fish in salted water for about 30 minutes.

Make the egg sauce

  1. Boil the two eggs for 7 minutes.

  2. Cool the boiled eggs and powder the yolks.

  3. Mix the powdered yolks with the melted butter.

  4. Add the diced egg whites to the yolk mixture.

  5. Heat the mixture until just boiling.

  6. Serve the sauce in a tureen.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Thyme + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the stuffing moist and tender during boiling.
Bread crumbs
Absorbs moisture and binds the stuffing so it holds together.
Eggs
Set when heated, thickening the sauce and binding the stuffing.
Melted butter
Gives the sauce richness and a smooth, flowing texture.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture until just boiling. Egg proteins thicken with gentle heat but curdle and turn grainy if overheated, so the sauce should be brought only to the point of boiling and kept smooth.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, bread, parsley, thyme, shallot, pepper, egg):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, bread, parsley, thyme, shallot, pepper, egg. 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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