Haddock

A handsome ground fish in the family Gadidae with cod and pollock, haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) was valued for its firm, white flesh with its capacity for being salted and smoked to make finnan haddie. Old-time New England fishermen used to recall a day before haddock was appreciated, but it was fished in the late eighteenth century and more widely caught in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In History and Methods of the Fisheries (1887), George Brown Goode reports that in the mid-1800s salted and dried haddock was nicknamed “skulljoe” on Cape Cod. Finnan haddie was named for the town of Findon, Scotland, where haddock was early salted and smoked commercially, though the process caught on in New England and was widely practiced in Portland, Maine.