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Sole, Curried
Fillet two soles, and cut each fillet slantwise into four or five pieces. If more convenient, instead of filleting the soles, skin and clean them, cut off the fins and gills, and cut each fish into three or four pieces, leaving the bones in. Rub the fish with curry-powder, and dredge a little flour upon it, then fry it in hot fat for two or three minutes, but do not cook it sufficiently. Have ready as much warm curry sauce as will barely cover the fish. Lay the fried slices of sole carefully in this, and let them boil gently till they are done enough, but not overdone. Serve the curry on a hot dish, and send rice boiled for curry to table separately. The curry sauce may be made as follows. Mince two onions and one sour apple, and fry them in hot fat, moving them about briskly till they are soft. Rub them through a sieve, and mix with the pulp a tea-spoonful of curry-paste, a tea-spoonful of curry powder, and a tea-spoonful of ground rice. Add gradually about three-quarters of a pint of stock, and boil the sauce till it is thick and smooth. Time to simmer the sole in the sauce, about ten minutes. Probable cost, with a pair of soles at 1s. 6d., 2s. 3d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward Anglo-Indian fish curry, with the sole part-fried and then finished in a thickened onion-and-apple sauce. The only real trap is the timing.
- The hinge: don't simmer for ten minutesSole fillets are thin and cook in two to three minutes; the fish is already part-fried before it goes into the sauce. Three to four minutes of the gentlest simmer is enough, and the recipe's own warning "but not overdone" matters more than its stated time. Fish left on the bone in thick steaks can take closer to the full ten.
- Three-quarters of a pintImperial measure, so 15 fl oz, about 1¾ US cups or 425 ml. It should reduce to a sauce that barely covers the fish.
- Curry paste and curry powderBoth were bottled commercial products by the later nineteenth century and the recipe assumes you have each. A good madras-style powder plus a spoonful of any commercial curry or vindaloo paste gives the intended double hit; a single teaspoon of each in this quantity of sauce is mild by current tastes.
- Ground riceFinely milled raw rice, sold as a pudding thickener. Rice flour is the nearest modern equivalent, though traditionally ground rice is milled a little coarser; cornflour works but sets glossier.
- A sour appleA cooking apple that collapses — Bramley in Britain, Granny Smith elsewhere. It is there for acidity and body, not sweetness, so avoid dessert apples.
- Sieving the baseThe onions and apple are fried soft, then pushed through a sieve. A short blitz with a stick blender is a quick substitute, though it breaks the fibre down rather than removing it, so the sauce will not be quite as smooth.
- Rice boiled for curryVictorian recipes for curry rice generally called for long-grain rice boiled in plenty of salted water, drained and dried out so the grains stayed separate. The recipe sends it to table in its own dish, not under the fish.
- YieldTwo soles give four to eight fillets depending on whether each side is lifted whole or split, and each fillet is then cut into four or five pieces. The stated five or six servings assumes the dish is one of several; treat it as four modern main-course servings.
Curry had been a fixture of English household cookery for a century by the time Cassell's compiled this entry, and its Victorian form is clearly visible here: bottled curry powder and curry paste bought ready-made, a base of fried onion and sour apple, a thickener of ground rice, and boiled rice sent to table separately rather than as a bed. The apple is the giveaway — it belongs to the British adaptation rather than to any Indian original, and it survived into the standard "curry sauce" of British catering well into the twentieth century. Fish curries of this kind put sole to practical use, part-frying it before finishing it in the sauce. The costing at the end of the entry is characteristic of the book, which was aimed at mistresses of middling households budgeting to the penny.