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To Dress Haddocks with Brown Sauce

A haddock dish prepared with a brown sauce made from onion, butter, flour, beef soup, and optional wine, ketchup, oysters, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,232 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Dress Haddocks with Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the haddock

  1. Gut and clean the haddocks, then wipe them with a cloth.

  2. Keep the breast of each haddock whole.

  3. Sprinkle salt over the haddocks and let them rest on a clean board for a few hours, then wipe off the salt.

  4. Cut off the heads and fins of the haddocks.

  5. Carefully remove the skin from the haddocks.

  6. If the haddocks are small, cut them in half; if large, cut them into thirds.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, brown the minced onion in butter.

  2. Dust the browned onion with flour.

  3. Pour in the beef soup and let it boil briefly.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the haddocks in a fish drainer, then boil them in salted water with a splash of vinegar until cooked.

  2. Carefully remove the haddocks, place them on a dish, and pour the sauce over them.

  3. Optionally, add white wine, mushroom ketchup, and oysters before serving, garnished with lemon.

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. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. White wine + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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 to a flaky texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps brown the onion for flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it is cooked with the onion and fat.
Beef soup
Forms the liquid base of the brown sauce, adding savoury flavour.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savoury depth when browned.

The step that matters

Boiling the haddocks. Fish cooks quickly and becomes dry and tough if overcooked, so it should be removed as soon as it is opaque and flakes easily.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (haddock, butter, flour, beef, vinegar, white wine, mushroom):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Onionthe original
  4. Potatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against haddock, butter, flour, beef, vinegar, white wine, mushroom. 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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