Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Haddock

A stewed haddock dish simmered in fish stock, spices, and wine, finished with a butter‑flour gravy and garnished with parsley and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Stewed Haddock

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Boil the fins and head of the fish to make stock, then strain the liquid.

Stew the fish

  1. Butter a porcelain saucepan and lay the fish pieces in it, flesh side down.

  2. Sprinkle each piece with cayenne pepper, mace, salt, and flour.

  3. Add 1 pint of the fish stock to the saucepan, cover, and simmer gently for 20 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally.

  4. Stir in Worcestershire sauce, anchovy sauce, and sherry or Madeira wine.

  5. In a separate bowl, rub together 2 ounces of butter and 2 tablespoons of flour.

  6. Stir this mixture into the gravy.

  7. Adjust seasoning with more mace and cayenne if needed, and let it simmer for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the fish in a deep dish, garnished with parsley and lemon, pouring the gravy over the fish.

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. Sauce + anchovytop 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. Fish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together637 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Haddock
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking gently to become tender and flaky.
Fish stock
Provides the liquid base for the gravy and carries the fish's savory flavor.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks, giving it body and a smooth texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the gravy, rounding out its flavor and mouthfeel.
Sherry or madeira wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavor to the gravy as it simmers.

The step that matters

Stirring in the butter and flour mixture. Adding flour raw to hot liquid can form lumps; rubbing it with butter first and stirring it in gradually helps it disperse and thicken the gravy smoothly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against haddock, fish, pepper, flour, butter, sauce, anchovy. 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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesScalloped CodScalloped Cod69 recipes