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Haddock, Finnan, in Sauce

Haddock, Finnan, in Sauce is a fish dish simmered in a vinegar and cayenne spiced sauce, served with toast and garnished.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Haddock, Finnan, in Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Soak the haddock as directed, then skin and flake or cut it into pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine Witt Sauce and minced shallot; boil until tender.

  2. Add white vinegar, cayenne, and salt to the sauce.

  3. Add the fish to the sauce, cover, and heat just below boiling for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the fish on buttered toast or fried bread, garnished with sliced hard boiled egg and lemon or beetroot.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

  5. Shallot + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Haddock
Forms the flaky main body of the dish, cooked gently in the sauce until tender.
Witt sauce
Provides the liquid base that carries the flavour and keeps the fish moist.
Shallot
Adds a mild, sweet onion-like aroma as it softens in the sauce.
White vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Heating the fish in the sauce. Heating just below boiling keeps the fish gently cooked and tender. A hard boil can toughen fish protein and break it into dry, ragged pieces.

“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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