Home › The Principles of Cookery › SOLE, BAKED, WITH FINE HERBS (another way)
SOLE, BAKED, WITH FINE HERBS (another way)
Cleanse, scale, trim, and skin a sole. Lay it in a buttered baking-dish, season with salt and pepper, and sprinkle a dozen chopped mushrooms, a finely-minced shallot, and a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley over it. Cover with thick white sauce, and bake in a moderate oven. When done enough, lift the sole upon a hot dish with a fish slicer; add the juice of half a lemon to the sauce, and stir into it until dissolved a slice of fresh butter; pour it over the fish, and serve. Time to bake, according to size. Probable cost, one thick sole, from 1s. to 1s. 6d. Sufficient for three persons.
A straightforward baked sole in the French manner, with two vague points that matter: oven heat and time. Both are worth pinning down before you start.
- Oven heatA "moderate oven" is conventionally glossed as somewhere around 350F/180C, though the book gives no temperatures and Victorian oven heats varied widely. The sauce protects the fish, so there is no need to go hotter.
- Timing"According to size" means roughly 15-20 minutes for a thick Dover sole of about 1 lb, less for thinner fillets. The fish is done when the flesh at the thickest point by the backbone lifts cleanly from the bone; sole overcooks quickly and turns cottony.
- Skinning a whole soleOnly the dark upper skin comes off in practice: nick it at the tail, get a grip with a cloth and pull it forward in one movement. Leave the white underskin on to hold the fish together during baking.
- The mushroomsA dozen mushrooms here means the small button caps of the period, not modern large chestnuts. About 4 oz total is right. Sweat them briefly in butter first if you want to drive off water that would otherwise thin the sauce.
- Thick white sauceA bechamel at roux proportions of about 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour to half a pint of milk gives a coating consistency; for a genuinely thick sauce increase the butter and flour. A thin sauce will slide off and boil into the dish.
- Finishing the sauceAdd the lemon juice and butter off the heat, stirring the butter in until glossy. A flour-thickened sauce is reasonably stable, but hard boiling after the butter goes in can make it oily.
- ShallotOne small shallot, minced very fine. Raw shallot in a 20-minute bake stays assertive, so keep the quantity modest.
- YieldAs stated, one thick sole feeds three as a course within a larger meal. For a main course served with potatoes, count it as two.
"Fine herbes" is the English rendering of the French fines herbes, which by the nineteenth century had come to mean less a fixed mixture of herbs than a chopped aromatic base of parsley, shallot and mushroom, often bound with butter or sauce. Cassell's carried several such treatments for sole, a fish that commonly received French handling in English kitchens. The price note is telling: a shilling to eighteenpence for a single thick sole was a serious outlay in a period when cheaper fish went for pennies. The "fish slicer", a broad flexible blade, was among the usual kitchen equipment, and a baked whole sole falls apart if lifted with anything narrower.