Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sole, Baked, with Wine Sauce
Sole, Baked, with Wine Sauce
Cleanse, scale, skin, trim, and dry a thick sole, and with a sharp knife make an incision down each side of the backbone. Season with pepper and salt, put it into a baking-dish thickly buttered, and pour upon it half a pint of French white wine, or, where economy is a consideration, a pint of cider or perry. Bake the fish in a moderate oven. When done enough, stir the liquor into half a pint of good melted butter, let it boil up, and add a dessert-spoonful of chopped parsley. Take the sauce off the fire, and stir into it until dissolved an ounce of fresh butter. Lift the fish carefully with a fish slicer upon a hot dish, pour the sauce over, and serve very hot. Time to bake, about fifteen minutes, according to size. Probable cost, a large sole, 1s. to 1s. 6d. Sufficient for three persons.
A straightforward baked sole that lives or dies by one Victorian term: "melted butter" is not butter you have melted. Read that point first.
- "Good melted butter"In Victorian English this means a flour-thickened butter sauce, typically around 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour cooked together and let down with about half a pint of milk or fish stock. If you simply melt half a pint of butter and add the wine-and-fish liquor, it will split. The final ounce of fresh butter stirred in off the heat is there to gloss and enrich the finished sauce, and that part works as written.
- Imperial measuresThis is a British book, so half a pint is 10 fl oz (about 285 ml) and a pint is 20 fl oz. A dessert-spoonful is roughly 2 teaspoons.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F / 180C. Fifteen minutes suits a thick sole; a thinner fish will be done sooner. The flesh should just part from the bone at the incisions cut along the backbone.
- PerryFermented pear juice, still made by specialist producers. Here it is offered as the economical alternative to white wine. Any dry cider or a dry unoaked white does the same job.
- The sole itself"Thick sole" most likely points to Dover sole. Skin the dark side and scale the white, or ask the fishmonger to do it. Lemon sole or a plaice fillet will work but cooks faster and gives less liquor.
- Butter the dish heavily"Thickly buttered" is not decoration. Sole sticks, and the whole point of lifting it with a fish slice onto a hot dish is to serve it in one piece.
- Reduce before thickeningHalf a pint of wine plus the juices the fish gives up will slacken the sauce considerably. Strain the pan liquor into a small pan and boil it down by half before combining it with the butter sauce.
- Yield and costThree servings, as stated. The "1s. to 1s. 6d." is a late-nineteenth-century retail price and is only of historical interest.
Baking a whole flatfish in wine with a butter sauce is the domesticated form of a restaurant technique: sole cooked in a shallow dish with wine, the resulting liquor turned into the sauce. Cassell's, published for households rather than professional kitchens, keeps the method but offers cider or perry as the thrifty substitute for "French white wine" -- giving a first-rate version and an economical one in the same paragraph. Dover sole was the prestige flatfish of the Victorian table, landed on the south and east coasts and sent inland by rail, and its firm flesh holds together under baking in a way that cheaper flatfish do not. The instruction to score each side of the backbone is practical: it lets heat into the thickest part and makes the fish easier to lift off the bone at table.