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Sole, Buttered
Clean, scale, skin, and dry the fish. Rub a tin dish quickly with a clove of garlic freshly cut, lay the soles in it, and dredge flour upon them. Put little pieces of butter here and there upon them, allowing three ounces of butter for each moderate-sized sole, and bake them until done enough in a moderate oven. Lay them on a hot dish, pour the butter over, and sprinkle on them a tea-spoonful of finely-minced parsley. Serve very hot. Time to bake, about twenty minutes, according to size. Probable cost, soles, 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. per pair.
A plain baked-butter treatment of sole that depends almost entirely on the quality of the fish and on not overcooking it. A few Victorian conventions need translating.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F (180C). The recipe gives about twenty minutes, according to size; the flesh should part cleanly from the backbone and look opaque throughout.
- SkinningSole is skinned by nicking the dark skin at the tail and pulling it off in one sheet. The white underskin is usually left on unless the fish is very large. If you are using fillets rather than whole fish, cut the baking time to 8–10 minutes.
- The butter is not a suggestionThree ounces (about 85 g, six tablespoons) per sole is a great deal by modern habit, but it is the sauce as well as the cooking fat — there is nothing else in the dish. Half that amount still works, though you will have less to pour over at the end.
- A tin dishAny shallow metal or ceramic roasting dish that holds the fish flat without crowding. Metal conducts faster and gives a little colour on the underside, which is what the original assumes.
- Rubbing with garlicThe cut clove on the dish is meant to leave a trace, not a flavour you can name. Do not chop garlic into the butter unless you want a different dish.
- Dredging flourA light, even dusting through a sieve. Too much flour and the butter turns to a pasty coating instead of browning.
- Yield and servingOne moderate sole per person; a pair serves two. Serve straight from the oven with the pan butter and parsley — butter that has stood and separated is the usual failure here.
- Cost noteThe "1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. per pair" is Victorian shilling pricing and has no useful modern equivalent.
Cassell's presents this among a long run of sole recipes because Dover sole was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the fish of the respectable English table: firm, sweet, and reliably supplied to London and the provinces by the fast fish trains that ran from Grimsby and Lowestoft to Billingsgate. Victorian cookbooks tend to treat sole either à la maître d'hôtel — fried or grilled and finished with butter and parsley — or in the elaborate French manner with a wine-based sauce. This version sits between the two: the garlic-rubbed dish and the generous baking butter are a nod to French practice, while the parsley finish and the refusal of any sauce beyond melted butter are thoroughly English. The instruction to rub with garlic rather than add it is itself a period marker, from a time when English cookery writers are often said to have regarded garlic as something to be hinted at rather than tasted.