Home › Fish, Oysters, Etc › Soles A La Colbert
Soles A La Colbert
Clean and trim the soles; wash and wipe them dry with a clean cloth; then flour them over and fry them, after which cut them open at the back, and carefully take out the back bone; fill the inside with some cold Maitre d'Hotel butter, turn the soles on their back in a dish, pour round them an essence of fish or of anchovies and serve quite hot.
A classic restaurant preparation set down in shorthand, as Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks did for anything a professional cook was assumed to know. The gaps are worth filling in before you start.
- The hinge: bone the fish before it is cooked, not afterPreparation before cooking — the classic method is to cut down either side of the backbone through the skin of the dark side, ease the fillets back, and snip or break the bone at head and tail before flouring, so the pocket is ready and the fillets curl open in the pan. The bone itself is then drawn out after frying, as the recipe directs; that order is standard rather than a slip.
- Which fishA whole sole of about 12-14 oz, one per person, is the usual portion; the recipe does not specify a variety. Lemon sole, witch or small plaice will work but are softer-fleshed and tear more easily when boned. What is sold as "sole" in the United States is often flounder, which is more fragile for this treatment.
- Flour them over and fry themFor a Colbert the fish is almost always floured, egged and breadcrumbed rather than floured alone, then deep-fried at 350-360F for about 4-5 minutes until the crumb is pale gold. Shallow frying in clarified butter works if you turn the fish once and baste.
- Maitre d'hotel butterSoftened butter beaten with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, then chilled firm. Allow about 1 oz per fish. It must go in cold and in a solid piece so it melts into a sauce inside the hot fish rather than running out in the pan.
- Essence of fish or of anchovies"Essence of fish" is a strongly reduced fish stock, the fumet reduced by two-thirds until it is glossy and coats a spoon. Anchovy essence was a bottled commercial product of the period; a teaspoon of anchovy paste or two mashed salted anchovies loosened with a little stock and lemon gives the same effect. A pound of trimmings and bones simmered 20 minutes, no longer, is enough for four.
- Turn the soles on their backThe phrase is ambiguous; usual restaurant service is with the boned, opened side uppermost so that the butter shows. Either way, pour the sauce around the fish rather than over it, as the recipe directs.
- Yield and timingOne sole serves one. Everything except the frying can be done ahead; once fried, the fish should be filled and sent to the table within a couple of minutes.
The dish is generally credited to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the preparation as we have it belongs to nineteenth-century French restaurant cooking rather than the seventeenth century. In French kitchen usage a la Colbert came to mean crumbed and fried with a maitre d'hotel butter, applied to whole small fish and later to soft-boiled eggs and vegetables. Anchovy essence, named here as an alternative sauce base, was a staple bottled seasoning of British and American larders through the whole Victorian era, a survivor of the older taste for salt-fish flavourings in sauces.