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SOLE, FILLETED (a la Tartare)
Fillet a large fresh sole in the usual way. Cut the pieces across, flour them, and dip them in egg and bread-crumbs. Let them lie in a cool place for an hour, and fry them in hot fat till they are of a bright brown colour. Drain them on a sieve before the fire for two or three minutes to free them perfectly from fat, and place them in a circle on a cold dish, with one piece overlapping the other. About an hour before the fish is to be served, prepare the sauce, and set it in a cool place till wanted. Serve in the centre of the circle. The sauce may be made as follows. Put the yolk of an egg, freed from the speck, into a bowl. Add a pinch of salt and a pinch of pepper, and stir in by drops about four ounces of good Lucca oil. Beat the sauce thoroughly between every addition, for the success of the sauce depends upon this being done, and with every eighth tea-spoonful put in a tea-spoonful of tarragon vinegar and a tea-spoonful of chilli vinegar. When the sauce is thick and smooth like cream, stir in a table-spoonful of dry mustard, a tea-spoonful of essence of anchovy, and a table-spoonful of chopped ravigote, chervil, and tarragon. Taste the seasoning, add a little salt and cayenne, if required, and serve. Time to fry the fillets, about three minutes. Probable cost, one large sole, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian fried sole with a hand-beaten mustard mayonnaise — essentially sauce tartare before pickles and capers became standard in it. The hinge is the sauce: the oil goes in drop by drop and the beating between additions is what holds the emulsion.
- Lucca oilLucca, in Tuscany, was the source of the mild, sweet olive oil that British cooks bought for salads and mayonnaise. Any good mild olive oil works; a strong, peppery modern extra-virgin will fight the anchovy and mustard. Four ounces is about half a cup.
- Emulsion techniqueOne yolk will carry half a cup of oil, but only if the first tablespoon goes in truly drop by drop. If it splits, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it as though it were oil.
- Raw yolkThe sauce is never cooked. Use pasteurised eggs, or the freshest shell eggs you can get, keep the sauce refrigerated, and use it the day it is made rather than the "cool place" of an unheated Victorian larder.
- Chilli vinegar and essence of anchovyChilli vinegar was vinegar steeped with chillies; use plain wine vinegar with a scrape of cayenne. Essence of anchovy is close to modern anchovy paste, though the bottled essence was a thinner liquid, so half a teaspoon of paste for the teaspoon called for is a safer starting point.
- RavigoteHere "ravigote" means the herb mixture rather than the sauce: chervil, tarragon, chives and often burnet. Since chervil and tarragon are then listed again, read the whole as a tablespoon of mixed soft green herbs, chives included.
- A tablespoon of dry mustardThat is assertive by modern taste, and it will bloom and sharpen as the sauce stands. Start with two teaspoons, let the sauce sit twenty minutes, and adjust.
- FryingFat at 350-375F; three minutes is right for fillet strips of an ordinary sole and they should not be crowded. The hour's rest in the cold before frying is not optional — it sets the egg-and-crumb coat so it does not slide off in the pan.
- Cold dish, warm fishThe "cold dish" is an unwarmed platter. Note that the recipe's own order — fillets fried and arranged first, sauce prepared an hour before serving — suggests the fish stands and is served cool rather than straight from the pan. Draining on a sieve rather than on paper keeps the crumb crisp.
- YieldAs stated, one large sole feeds four or five as a course; a large sole is roughly 1 1/2 lb whole, giving four fillets.
À la tartare was used in nineteenth-century kitchen French as a label for dishes sharply seasoned with mustard, vinegar and herbs — the name generally traced to the vague European use of "Tartar" for the fierce and the far-eastern, rather than to any dish actually eaten on the steppe. Cassell's version differs from the tartare of modern fish shops: a mustard-heavy mayonnaise finished with fines-herbes and anchovy, with no chopped gherkin or caper in sight. The recipe's insistence that the sauce be made an hour ahead and left in a cool place reflects a kitchen where sauces were built by hand and the coolest spot in the house was a stone larder shelf; the same reasoning gives the breaded fillets their hour of rest before frying, a step that still earns its keep.