Finnan Haddie: Smoked Haddock From Findon

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Finnan haddie's association with Findon is well documented. Exactly when the cure began is uncertain. Stories that it originated in a fire that accidentally smoked fish are legend. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) is used here for the natural history of the haddock and the wider history of smoking; where its dating differs from McNeill's, both are given.

Findon

established Findon, pronounced "Finnan" locally, is a small coastal village in Kincardineshire, south of Aberdeen. Its fisher families caught haddock and preserved them by splitting, salting and smoking them over the fire, using peat or green wood. The resulting fish became known as Finnan haddies, "haddie" being Scots for haddock.

established The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929; second edition 1963), gives the fullest short history. Findon, she writes, stands on an exposed hillside in the Mearns, about six miles south of Aberdeen, above a rocky North Sea coast. The fishwives cured their husbands' inshore catches, some for home use and some packed and sent by stage-coach to Edinburgh. In the eighteenth century these were hard, salty, peat-cured fish called "Findrums"; in the early nineteenth century the cure was modified into the milder finnan of later times. Trawling drew the industry to Torry, now part of Aberdeen, and by the mid-twentieth century Findon had a dozen houses and about forty people.

established Robert Fergusson's "Leith Races" (1773), quoted by McNeill, shows the fish already reaching the Edinburgh area under the older name, with "Buchan bodies" crying their bunches of Findrums along the beach.

shared The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), places Findon in the wider pattern of east-coast fishing at the start of the eighteenth century. From small boats dragged up on open beaches, the men fished by line for haddock, whiting, codling and turbot. Much of the catch was sold fresh, especially near Edinburgh, but some was cured to local taste, and Findon haddocks, she writes, "even at that early date were becoming well known". The women did most of the shore work. They baited the lines each day, from 500 to 3,000 hooks, sold the catch, set its price, cured fish and often walked twelve or fifteen miles to town and back with a loaded creel. The Findon haddie was a product of that household economy as much as of the boats. Her account is a general one for the east coast, not a study of Findon itself.

established The fish travelled with its makers' reputation. James Thomson, an Aberdeen baker's apprentice who emigrated to Montreal in 1844, wrote home missing the smoked fish of the east coast: "If some Findon Nannie would come here with her creel, I guess she would soon get it empty", as quoted by Hope.

Other cures

established McNeill places the Finnan haddie among a family of north-east cures. In the mid-nineteenth century there were three main ones: the Moray Firth or Buckie cure, which gave a pale, lightly smoked "Moray Firth" haddie; the Auchmithie or Arbroath cure, which produced the closed, copper-coloured smokie; and the Findon cure. The "bervie", named from Inverbervie in the Mearns, had fallen out of use by her day. Speldings, small haddock or whiting split, salted and dried on the rocks without smoke, she distinguishes carefully from finnans.

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) adds two more Scottish names. "Rizzared" haddock were simply dried in the sun. "Glasgow pales" were small haddock cleaned, split and brined like finnans but taken out of the smoke when they had reached only a pale straw colour. It describes the Arbroath smokie as the hot-smoked, closed cousin of the family. Together these show a coast where every port had its own way with the same fish.

established Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), adds the names for the unsmoked cures: reisted (smoke-dried) haddock, rizzar'd and tiled haddock (both sun-dried), blawn fish (wind-dried) and speldings (split fish dried on the rocks by the sea). Walter Scott, on a youthful trip to the battlefield of Prestonpans, "dined at Prestonpans on tiled haddocks very sumptuously", and in Robert Louis Stevenson's St Ives the hero sits down to "rizzar'd haddocks and mustard" with a sheep's head and a haggis. Hope also describes the Aberdeen fillet, a single skin-on fillet smoked only briefly, as the fish for Omelette Arnold Bennett, the open smoked-haddock omelette devised at the Savoy.

Why haddock is smoked

established The Companion explains the chemistry behind the choice. Haddock does not take salt as well as cod, so the traditional ways of keeping it are drying and smoking rather than salting. Very light salting is used only for fish meant to be eaten soon, such as the "green-salted" haddock of Denmark and the "night-salted" haddock of Iceland. Smoke on its own preserves only weakly; its main effects are to dry the surface, coat it with substances that discourage bacteria and give flavour. The lighter the cure, the shorter the keeping time, which is why the mild Finnan haddie depended on fast transport.

shared The Companion's entry on smoking dates the lightening of Scottish haddock smoking, "to produce the 'Finnan haddie', a golden-yellow split fish", to the same decades as the arrival of the kipper in the 1840s. McNeill puts the change from hard Findrums to mild finnans in the early nineteenth century. The two are not far apart, and the change was probably gradual; the Companion is writing about the general trend, McNeill about Findon itself.

The cure

established For a traditional Finnan haddie, the haddock is beheaded, split down the back with the bone left in, washed and briefly soaked in brine, then hung and cold-smoked for several hours. Cold smoking flavours and preserves the fish without cooking it. The finished fish is pale gold. Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), notes that the colour deepens slightly after the fish leaves the smokehouse.

established McNeill prints Mrs Dalgairns's home method (1829): the haddock were cleaned, split and beheaded, salted for two hours (or overnight if they were to keep more than a week), dried in the open air for two or three hours, and smoked in a chimney over peat or hardwood sawdust. Without a suitable chimney, an old cask open at both ends would do, with sawdust smouldering round a red-hot iron and the fish tied in pairs by the tail over rods across the top. They were to reach "a fine yellow colour" within twelve hours, and Meg Dods warned that they lost much of their delicacy if kept more than a day.

shared Sir Walter Scott, in a note to Boswell's Tour to the Hebrides quoted by McNeill, said the genuine Finnan haddock was dried over the smoke of seaweed and sprinkled with salt water as it cured, giving a flavour "inimitable on any other coast". He described a dinner at which Edinburgh "philosophers" served their own imitation smoked haddock alongside the real thing, and only one guest in twelve preferred the imitation. Scott's account of seaweed fuel is not supported by the later recipes, which use peat or wood, so the fuel probably varied.

By rail to London

established In the nineteenth century, railways allowed fresh and lightly cured fish to reach London and other cities within a day. Finnan haddies became fashionable breakfast fare, and the name was used for smoked haddock produced in Aberdeen and elsewhere.

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) notes that the fish, once smoked over a peat fire at Findon, became so famous that it was prepared by less traditional methods far away, including in the United States. The American ichthyologist George Brown Goode, in what the Companion calls a moment of aberration, even referred to them as "Finland haddocks". Smoked haddock also became popular in France, where the borrowed word haddock now means smoked haddock.

The haddock

established The Companion describes the haddock, Melanogrammus aeglefinus, as a fish of the cod family, important on both sides of the North Atlantic, south to the Bay of Biscay in the east and New England in the west. Market fish are 40 to 60 centimetres long. It has a dark greenish-brown or purplish-grey back, a black lateral line and a dark "thumbprint" on each side. Like the John Dory, it is linked in popular tradition with the fish St Peter picked up, which the Companion points out it cannot be, since haddock do not live in the Mediterranean, let alone the Sea of Galilee.

established For cooking, haddock and cod are close rivals. The Companion notes that Icelanders rate haddock higher, and that in northern England Yorkshire prefers haddock for fish and chips while Lancashire prefers cod.

Dyed imitations

established Much commercial smoked haddock is dyed bright yellow to give it a smoked appearance, often with little real smoking. Traditional Finnan haddies are undyed.

In the kitchen

established How smoked haddock got into kedgeree. The food historian Lizzie Collingham, in Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (2005), traces kedgeree to khichari, the everyday rice-and-lentil dish of India. British households in India often ate it for breakfast with fish, which had to be eaten early before the heat spoiled it, and they garnished it with hard-boiled eggs and fried onions. Back in Britain the dish was anglicised further. Collingham says it was the aristocracy, serving kedgeree at country-house weekend breakfasts, who settled on smoked haddock as the definitive fish and usually dropped the lentils. That is how a Scottish cure became the standard fish in a dish of Indian origin.

established Finnan haddie is the traditional fish in Cullen skink, the north-east soup of smoked haddock, potato and milk, and in kedgeree. It is also poached in milk and served with a poached egg for breakfast.

established McNeill gives several old ways of serving it. An old cottage cookery book says that the "highly smoked split haddock" of Findon, Aberdeen and St Andrews should be broiled over or in front of a quick, clear fire and served with butter rubbed well in. Her "fisherwife's fashion" steams the skinned fish in butter and finishes it in a little thickened milk. "Ham and haddie" fries the fish in the fat from slices of smoked ham, though she prefers the paler Moray Firth haddie for that dish. Her Cullen skink is a cottage soup of Finnan haddie, onion, milk and mashed potato.

established A Victorian household's advice. Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), quotes the notes on "Findon Haddies" in The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie (1909), compiled from the manuscripts of an Aberdeenshire hostess. Soak them half an hour in cold water if necessary, skin them, rub them with olive oil and cook them five or six minutes before a clear fire in a double gridiron, back first: "Hot dish. Hot napkin." The notes record other people's methods too. A Mr Davidson baked them in a little milk; Lizzie Emslie cooked them in cream "till all but dry"; one batch had to be soaked overnight because "the crofter said they were too strong in taste"; and Sir Bartle Frere soaked them in buttermilk. The soaking advice suggests that some finnans reaching the house were still strongly cured.

established Breakfast and high tea. Finnans were a breakfast fish for visitors as well as natives. The poet Robert Southey, touring in 1819, recorded "a good breakfast as usual in Scotland" of Findon haddocks, eggs, preserved blackcurrants and honey. Elizabeth Craig's Menus for a Year (c.1938) gave stewed Finnan haddock for a January Monday breakfast. Hope, writing in 1987, judged finnan haddock the fish served most often at Scottish breakfasts, with fried haddock the favourite at high tea. Her own method was to simmer the fish in milk with a bay leaf and peppercorns and make a thin béchamel from the strained milk.

shared The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) cautions against treating Cullen skink as unique. It points out that McNeill happened to single out the Cullen version, but that it is one of a number of smoked-haddock soups thickened with potato, which Catherine Brown says fishwives made all along the coast. The word skink, the Companion adds, means the shin or hough, so the archetypal skink was a beef soup; the fishing towns presumably adapted it. That last step is the Companion's inference. In Susan Ferrier's novel Marriage (1818), the gourmand Dr Redgill praises the Finnan haddock as "just salt enough to be piquant", and McNeill's sample Highland breakfast menu includes Finnan haddie with a poached egg.

• Findon is pronounced "Finnan".
• "Haddie" is Scots for haddock.
• A true Finnan haddie is pale gold, not bright yellow.
• Railways made Finnan haddies popular in London.
• Finnan haddie is the fish in Cullen skink.
• In the eighteenth century the harder, saltier ancestor of the Finnan haddie was called a "Findrum".
• Findon fishwives sent their cured haddock to Edinburgh by stage-coach.
• Sir Walter Scott claimed the true Finnan haddock was smoked over seaweed.
• In French, "haddock" means smoked haddock.
• An American fish expert once called them "Finland haddocks".
• "Glasgow pales" were small haddock smoked only to a pale straw colour.
• Haddock is smoked rather than salted because it does not take salt as well as cod.
• An Aberdeen emigrant in Montreal in the 1840s wrote that a "Findon Nannie" with her creel would soon sell out there.
• Lady Clark of Tillypronie's household soaked some finnans overnight because they were "too strong in taste".

• Myth: Bright yellow smoked haddock is traditional Finnan haddie. Traditional Finnan haddies are undyed and take their pale gold colour from smoke alone. Much commercial smoked haddock is dyed, often with little real smoking.
• Myth: The Finnan haddie began when a fire accidentally smoked some fish. Exactly when the cure began is uncertain, and such stories are legend.
• Myth: The Finnan haddie needed the railways to leave Findon. Findon fishwives were already sending cured haddock to Edinburgh by stage-coach. The railways carried it to London and other cities.
• Disputed: The traditional fuel. Peat, hardwood sawdust and green wood are all recorded, and Scott said the genuine fish was dried over seaweed smoke. Later recipes do not support seaweed, so the fuel probably varied.