Skip to main content
Main

Haddock

A haddock is boiled in water and milk, then served with butter, pepper, and optional poached eggs or tomatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Haddock

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the haddock

  1. Fill a Yorkshire pudding tin halfway with water and add ⅓ cup of milk. Bring to a boil over medium heat.

  2. Trim the haddock, removing fins, and place it in the boiling water and milk.

  3. Simmer gently for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Remove the fish with a fish-slice, draining excess liquid, and serve on a hot dish.

  2. Top with a little butter and a sprinkle of pepper.

  3. Garnish with poached eggs or sliced tomatoes if desired.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  3. Milk + tomatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Haddock + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together764 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 into soft, flaky pieces as it poaches.
Milk
Adds a mild, creamy flavour and richness to the poaching liquid.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the finished fish a smooth, savoury finish.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 10 minutes. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil cooks the fish evenly and keeps it tender and flaky instead of tough or broken up.

Swap the tomato

The recipe marks tomato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (haddock, milk, butter, pepper, egg):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

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

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesCream Tomato SoupCream Tomato Soup28 recipes