Britain and Ireland · Volume 34, Salt, Smoke and the Land the Clearances Remade
Cullen Skink
Mainland Highlands, Moray coast
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 45 minutes
- Researched
- 5 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Smoked haddock, potato and milk, poached and thickened into a soup, named for the small Moray coast town where it was first made.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 45 minutes.
Ingredients
- 500g undyed smoked haddock, ideally Finnan-style
- 50g butter
- 1 onion, finely chopped
- 500g potatoes, peeled and diced
- 600ml whole milk
- 150ml double cream
- to taste chopped parsley, salt and pepper
Method
- Lay the haddock in a wide pan, cover with the milk, and bring gently to a simmer. Poach 8 to 10 minutes, until the fish just flakes, then lift it out and set aside, reserving the milk.
- Melt the butter in a clean pan, and cook the onion gently 5 minutes, until soft but not coloured.
- Add the diced potato and the reserved milk, and simmer 15 to 20 minutes, until the potato is fully tender. Roughly mash a third of it against the side of the pan to thicken the soup.
- Flake the haddock, discarding skin and any bones, and stir it back in with the cream. Warm through gently without boiling, and season.
- Serve scattered with chopped parsley.
What a modern chef changes
The haddock smoked at home, undyed, rather than bought pre-coloured.
Rung 1
Method
- Cure your own haddock in salt for an hour, then hot-smoke it yourself on a Big Green Egg over hardwood, fully cooked in under an hour, exactly the Arbroath smokie's own logic applied to a fillet rather than a whole fish. Most shop-bought smoked haddock reaching a British supermarket is dyed bright yellow with a food colouring that has nothing to do with how it was actually cured; smoking your own removes that entirely.
- Judge doneness by touch rather than the clock, since a home smoker's heat is less consistent than a commercial kiln.
- Reserve and reduce the poaching milk hard before returning it to the soup, concentrating a flavour the traditional method, built for speed rather than intensity, tends to leave thinner than it could be.