Home › The Principles of Cookery › SOLE (a la Colbert)
SOLE (a la Colbert)
Take a thick sole, scale it, draw off the dark skin, and clean the fish; with a sharp knife loosen the flesh from the bone on one side, without taking it off; make an incision on both sides of the bone down the length of the fish, and with the handle of a knife break it in one or two places, so that when the fish is done enough the bone may be removed without spoiling the appearance of the fish. Replace the flesh on the bone where it has been disturbed; egg and bread-crumb the fish, let it stand an hour, and then fry in the usual way (see SOLE, FRIED). When done enough, carefully remove the back-bone, and in the cavity thus made place a little maitre d'hotel butter. Serve the fish on a hot dish, garnish with parsley, and send a cut lemon, or, if preferred, plain melted butter or maitre d'hotel sauce to table with it. The maitre d'hotel butter may be made as follows. Wash a handful of picked parsley-leaves, chop them finely, put them into the corner of a napkin, dip them in cold water, and wring them dry. This second washing will decrease the raw taste of the parsley. Put it in a basin, and with it a piece of fresh butter the size of an egg, a little pepper and salt, and a table-spoonful of lemon-juice. Mix the butter and parsley with the point of a knife till smooth and creamy, when it will be ready for use. It must not be melted, or it would turn oily. Time, about twenty minutes to fry a thick fish. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A classic treatment of whole sole, boned through the back so the cavity can be filled with herb butter. Two things in the original need adjusting: the frying time, and the assumption that you have a fishmonger who will hand you a thick Dover sole.
- The hinge: cracking the backboneBreaking the bone in one or two places before cooking is what allows you to pull it out cleanly afterwards. If you skip it, the spine comes out in fragments and the fish tears open, which defeats the whole point of the dish.
- Frying time"About twenty minutes" is considerably longer than modern practice would suggest. In oil at 350-375F, a crumbed sole of 12-14 oz should be done in roughly 6-10 minutes, turning once; the flesh should just part from the bone. Held to twenty minutes it will overcook inside a very dark crust.
- The hour's restNot idle time. Letting the egged and crumbed fish stand firms the coating so it survives frying and the later boning. An hour in the refrigerator, uncovered, is better than an hour on the counter.
- Butter "the size of an egg"Roughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. With a handful of parsley, a tablespoon of lemon juice and seasoning that makes a generous amount of maitre d'hotel butter for one fish; the surplus keeps rolled in parchment in the freezer.
- Keep the butter coldThe warning against melting it is the reason the dish works. Worked cold, it stays an emulsion and melts into the hot cavity at the table. Melted first, it splits and runs out as oily liquid.
- Wringing the parsleyThe second wash and squeeze in a napkin removes the green sap that tastes raw and grassy. A clean tea towel or a double layer of muslin does the same job.
- The fish itselfDover sole is what is meant, and it is expensive. Lemon sole, witch or a thick plaice will take the same treatment, though softer-fleshed flats are harder to bone whole after cooking. Ask for the fish scaled and the dark skin removed.
- YieldOne sole of this size serves two or three, as the original says. "1s. 6d." is the book's probable cost for the dish as a whole, not a useful guide to anything now.
The name honours Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, whose name was attached in the nineteenth century to a small family of dishes and to sauce Colbert, a maitre d'hotel butter enriched with meat glaze and madeira; the fish version is generally traced to the Paris restaurant cooking of the mid-1800s rather than to Colbert's own century. Its appearance in Cassell's reflects how thoroughly French restaurant technique had entered the English middle-class kitchen by the 1870s and 80s, and also how cheap sole then was in Britain: North Sea trawling and the railways put Dover sole on suburban tables at a price that reads as absurd today. The boning trick is the interesting part, a piece of pure kitchen craft that lets a whole fish arrive at table looking untouched while carrying a spoonful of green butter inside it.