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Sole, Cutlets Of
When soles are so large that they cannot conveniently be fried whole, they may be divided into cutlets. To do this, skin and clean the sole, and cut it crosswise through the bone into pieces about an inch wide. Fry these in the usual way. When done enough, lay them in a circle on a hot dish, with one piece resting upon another, and put fried parsley in the centre. Time to fry, according to the thickness of the fish. Probable cost, soles, 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. per pair. Sufficient, one moderate-sized pair for three or four persons.
A straightforward butchery-and-frying instruction rather than a formula; the only real decisions are how you coat the cutlets and how hot the fat is.
- "Fry in the usual way"For a Victorian fried sole this would ordinarily mean seasoned flour, beaten egg and fine breadcrumbs, fried in fat deep enough to float the pieces. Shallow frying in butter and oil works too, but the crumb coat holds better in deep fat.
- TimingThe book declines to give one, and rightly. Inch-wide cutlets from a large sole cook through in 3-4 minutes in hot fat; they are done when the crumb is deep gold and the flesh pulls cleanly from the backbone.
- Which soleThis calls for a fish too big to fit a pan whole, so a large Dover sole. Lemon sole, witch or the various flounders sold as "sole" are thinner and are better filleted than cut across the bone.
- Cutting through the boneUse a heavy knife or a cleaver and a single decisive push per cut; sawing shreds the flesh. Trim the frill of fin first so the pieces sit neatly. The dark skin comes off a sole readily if you nick the tail and pull toward the head; the white skin is more stubborn.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs thoroughly, or they will spit violently in the fat. A few seconds is enough - it should stay green and go crisp, not brown.
- Cost and yield1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. per pair is late-Victorian pricing and has no useful modern equivalent. One good pair of soles serves three or four as a main course.
- ServingServe at once with lemon, and anchovy or tartare sauce separately rather than poured over.
Cutting a fish across the bone into short lengths is the same logic that gives us salmon steaks and cod cutlets, and Victorian kitchens applied it freely to any fish that outgrew the pan. Sole was the prestige flatfish of nineteenth-century British cookery, landed in quantity in the North Sea and carried inland by rail, and the large specimens were often too broad for a domestic frying pan. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s-80s as a single-volume reference arranged alphabetically, carries dozens of sole entries in this way: not so much distinct dishes as a catalogue of every sensible thing a cook might do with the fish. The circle of overlapping pieces with fried parsley at the centre was a familiar way of sending up the dish, and the bunch of crisp green parsley in the middle of a dish appears again and again in kitchen manuals of the time as the expected finish for anything fried.