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Sole, Cold
Divide the cold fish into-fillets. Put a lump of clarified fat or butter into the saucepan. When melted, dredge in half a table-spoonful of flour, and let it fry till brown. Then put in an onion cut into quarters. When these quarters are brown, add a bunch of herbs and, gradually, a cupful of broth or water, half a wine-glassful of vinegar, and a little ketchup. Let the sauce stew very gently till the onion is soft; then season with pepper and salt. Let it simmer a quarter of an hour longer. Put in the fish with a pickled gherkin or two cut into small bits, or in preference a few capers. Let the whole simmer together for ten minutes, and if the sauce is not thick enough, add a little butter rolled in flour.
A Victorian way of using up yesterday's boiled or fried sole: a quick brown sauce built in the pan, sharpened with vinegar and capers, into which the cold fillets are warmed through. Two things matter — the sauce must be finished before the fish goes near it, and the fish must barely be heated.
- The hinge: don't cook the fish twiceThe sole is already cooked. Ten minutes of simmering will shred it into cotton wool. Have the sauce fully made and seasoned, slide the fillets in off the heat or at the barest tremble, and give them three or four minutes, spooning sauce over rather than stirring.
- Wine-glassful and cupfulA Victorian wine-glass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so half a glass of vinegar is roughly 1 fl oz (2 tablespoons). A cupful of broth is about 8 fl oz. Use a mild malt or cider vinegar; sherry vinegar also works and is gentler.
- "Ketchup"In a Victorian English kitchen this means mushroom or walnut ketchup — thin, dark, salty, closer to Worcestershire sauce than to anything tomato. A teaspoon of mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire gives the intended savoury depth; tomato ketchup will make it sweet and wrong.
- A bunch of herbsA bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme, a bay leaf, tied with string so it can be pulled out. Tie it or the sauce needs straining later.
- Clarified fatClarified butter or beef dripping. Ordinary butter will do, but the flour is to be fried until brown, and milk solids scorch — clarified butter, ghee or a neutral oil holds up better at that stage.
- Browning the flourHalf a tablespoon of flour in fat, cooked to a nut brown, is a small brown roux and takes several minutes over moderate heat. It thickens far less than a pale roux, which is why the recipe offers beurre manié at the end.
- Beurre manié"Butter rolled in flour" is equal parts soft butter and flour kneaded together, dropped in in pea-sized pieces off the boil and whisked in. Let it bubble briefly to lose the raw flour taste.
- YieldThe quantities would suit the fillets of one or two soles, enough for about two; the recipe itself gives no yield. Serve hot, despite the title, which refers to the state of the fish going in, not the dish coming out.
Late-Victorian household dictionaries devote a good deal of space to what to do with cold cooked fish and meat, because a large joint or a fish bought whole was expected to reappear at a second and third meal. The sauce here is a small brown sauce in the French manner — roux, onion, herbs, liquid — but pulled sharply English by vinegar, mushroom ketchup, gherkins and capers, the same acid-and-pickle register that flavours devilled dishes and cold-meat sauces of the period. Sole was among the most prized flatfish of the London market, Dover sole above all, and a household that had paid for one would not throw the remains away; the piquant sauce does the double duty of freshening fish a day old and disguising the fact that it is a day old.