Smoked Haddock with a Poached Egg

The smell is what gets you. Smoked haddock in warm milk fills a kitchen the way few other things can: salt, smoke, butter, something faintly sweet from the dairy. It's a January smell. A Saturday morning smell, when the windows are wet with condensation and there's nowhere you need to be for an hour.

This is not a complicated plate of food. It's a piece of good fish, gently poached, with an egg on top. But the simplicity is the point. The milk does two things: it softens the salt of the cure and it becomes the sauce, pale gold and silky from the butter and the fish's own juices. The egg, if you get it right, sits on top like a gift, its yolk ready to break and run into everything beneath it. You mop the lot up with bread. We're only making breakfast.

I come back to this dish when the mornings are dark and cold and the idea of standing at the stove for twenty minutes feels like exactly enough effort. It's the kind of meal I write down in the notebook not because I'll forget the recipe, but because I want to remember the morning. The light through the kitchen window. The steam off the pan. The quiet satisfaction of putting a warm plate in front of someone before the day has properly started.