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Fish Pudding

A baked haddock pudding with eggs, parsley, onion, bread crumbs, and optional veal suet, served with a brown soup sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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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 ↓

Fish Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish mixture

  1. Bone and skin the haddocks, then pound them in a mortar and rub through a fine sieve.

  2. Return the fish to the mortar and add eggs, parsley, onion, white pepper, salt, bread crumbs, and veal suet or marrow if using. Pound all ingredients together until well combined.

Cook and make the sauce

  1. Transfer the mixture into a shape and boil for 1 hour.

  2. For the sauce, boil the heads and fins of the haddocks in brown soup. Strain the soup and thicken it with butter and flour.

  3. Before serving, stir in anchovy sauce, essence of lobster, and Harvey sauce, then let it boil.

  4. Pour the sauce around the pudding before serving.

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. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  3. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Parsley + white peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

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 pudding, giving it its flesh and light, tender texture.
Eggs
Bind the pounded fish so the pudding holds its shape when boiled.
Bread
Soaks up moisture and helps keep the pudding soft rather than dense.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and, with flour, gives it a smooth, thickened body.
Flour
Thickens the strained soup into a smooth sauce with butter.

The step that matters

Pounding the fish until well combined. Thorough pounding breaks the fish into a fine, evenly mixed paste so the eggs and bread bind it into a smooth pudding rather than a crumbly one.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (haddock, egg, parsley, onion, bread, veal, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against haddock, egg, parsley, onion, bread, veal, 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.

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