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Soles La Gratin
Spread some fresh butter on a dish, and place the soles, head and tail, on it; season with pepper and salt; sprinkle little chopped parsley over them, and moisten well with white wine; half an hour before dinner put them in the oven to bake; when they have been in about twenty minutes take them out, and, after saucing them over with brown sauce, shake some raspings of bread crumbs over the whole, and put the soles back in the oven for a few minutes; just before sending to table pass the red-hot salamander over them and serve.
A straightforward baked sole finished under heat, written for a kitchen with a coal range and a salamander. The only real translations needed are the equipment and the sauce.
- The salamanderAn iron plate on a handle, heated red in the fire and held over a dish to glaze the top. A broiler set to high, with the dish on the upper rack for a minute or two, does the same work.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the range had none. A moderate oven, around 375F, suits it; the fish should be just opaque at the thickest point.
- TimingTwenty minutes suits whole Dover soles of a pound or so, left on the bone. Skinned fillets are done in 8 to 10 minutes and will be dry and cottony at twenty.
- "Head and tail"Probably means the fish laid alternately, one head-end to the next fish's tail-end, so they pack flat in a single layer without overlapping; it may simply mean the soles go in whole, head and tail still attached.
- Brown sauceThe book assumes a pot of espagnole or a reduced brown gravy standing ready. A modern equivalent is a well-reduced veal or chicken stock thickened lightly with a brown roux, or a fish velouté darkened with a little glace.
- RaspingsDried crusts of bread grated fine, not the soft fresh crumb. Panko or dry unseasoned breadcrumbs give the same crisp, sandy coat; fresh crumbs will go soggy in the sauce.
- White wine"Moisten well" means enough to film the bottom of the dish without poaching the fish; a few tablespoons per sole is ample.
- YieldOne whole sole per person, or two large fillets.
Au gratin in nineteenth-century English cookery meant a dish finished with a browned crust rather than the cream-and-cheese casserole the phrase now suggests, and the browning was done with a salamander long before overhead broilers existed in domestic ranges. Sole was the fishmonger's aristocrat in Britain and in Anglo-American cookbooks that copied British practice, treated with more ceremony than cod or haddock and often given a French name and a French sauce, though it was also routinely fried, grilled and served under plain English names. That a household book still assumes the reader keeps brown sauce on hand and owns a salamander says a good deal about the professional French kitchen vocabulary that these compilations borrowed wholesale, whether or not the average reader had either.