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SOLE, BAKED (en Matelote Normande)
This dish very much resembles SOLE, NORMANDE proper. Prepare a stuffing as follows. Mince finely and separately a dozen mushrooms, a small handful of picked and washed parsley-leaves, and one shallot. Mix these ingredients together, put them into a saucepan, and fry them with two ounces of fresh butter, a little pepper and salt, and a small pinch of powdered spice. Stir the mixture over the fire for five or six minutes, take it off the fire, beat the yolks of two eggs, and mix them with the herbs; stir them over the fire again for about half a minute, and spread the forcemeat on a plate to cool. Cleanse and trim a fresh thick sole. Remove the bone carefully so as not to deform the fish, and put the cold forcemeat in the cavity thus prepared. Lay the sole in a buttered dish or saucepan, season with salt and pepper, and moisten with a glassful of French white wine or cider (see SOLE, NORMANDE)--a wine-glassful will be enough for one sole. Cover the fish with buttered white paper, to prevent its acquiring any colour, and bake until done enough. Watch it carefully whilst it is baking, as if it is too much done it will be good for nothing. Serve on a hot dish. If liked, tomato or shrimp sauce may be sent to table with the fish. Time to bake the sole, according to size. Probable cost, 1s. or 1s. 6d. for one thick sole.
A stuffed baked sole with a mushroom duxelles bound with egg yolk. The recipe assumes a cook who knows how to bone a flat fish and read an oven by hand, so the two things it leaves out are the temperature and the timing.
- Do not overbakeThe recipe's own warning is the hinge, but it gives no temperature and only "time to bake the sole, according to size". A moderate oven of about 190C/375F will suit; a thick sole will want roughly 12 to 18 minutes, a thinner fish less. It is done when the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone line.
- Boning the soleThis is a pocket-boned fish, not filleted. Skin the dark side, cut down each side of the backbone from the top, free the frame and snip it out at head and tail, leaving the fish whole with a cavity down the middle. A fishmonger will do it if asked for a sole boned for stuffing.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books a wine-glass is about 2 fl oz, roughly 60 ml. Dry cider is the more Norman choice; a dry white such as Muscadet or Chablis works equally well.
- Powdered spiceThe "small pinch of powdered spice" most likely means one of the mixed spice blends of the period, generally built on nutmeg and mace with some clove and pepper, though the proportions varied from book to book. A scrape of nutmeg and a pinch of mace covers it.
- The forcemeatThe mushrooms, shallot and parsley are a duxelles; fry off the liquid so the mixture is dry, or the stuffing will weep into the fish. The half-minute over the heat after adding the yolks is meant only to thicken, not to scramble, so pull the pan off early and keep stirring.
- The buttered paperA round of buttered parchment laid directly on the fish, what French kitchens call a cartouche. It keeps the surface pale and moist; a lid or foil traps steam more closely and tends towards poaching rather than baking.
- Sourcing the fishDover sole is expensive and increasingly scarce; a thick lemon sole, witch or plaice takes the same treatment, though thinner fish cook faster still. Two ounces of butter is 55 g.
- YieldOne thick sole serves one generously or two as a starter. The stuffing quantity given looks generous for a single fish.
Matelote is the fisherman's stew of northern France, usually river fish in wine, and to call a dish normande is to signal the Norman larder: cider, butter, cream, mussels, shrimps. Sole a la normande proper, the grand version garnished with oysters, mussels, shrimps and mushrooms in a cream sauce, is generally traced to Paris restaurant cooking of the 1830s rather than to Normandy itself, and Cassell's here offers a plainer relative for the household kitchen, with the cider or white wine, the mushroom stuffing and the shrimp sauce standing in for the full garnish. The instruction to shield the fish with buttered paper so that it acquires no colour reflects a nineteenth-century ideal of white fish cookery in which browning was a fault, not a virtue. The prices, a shilling to eighteenpence for a thick sole, place the dish among the more considered dinners of a middle-class late-Victorian table.