Home › The Principles of Cookery › SOLE, FILLETED (a l'Italienne)
SOLE, FILLETED (a l'Italienne)
Fillet a large fresh sole in the usual way, and divide each fillet into halves by cutting it across. Season the pieces with pepper and salt, and rub them over with cut lemon. Rub two ounces of butter into eight ounces of biscuit flour. Add a pinch of salt, and make a stiff paste by mixing with the flour the yolk of an egg which has been beaten up with the eighth of a pint of cold water. Roll this paste out very thin, and cut it into pieces of a size and shape that will entirely cover the filleted fish. Wrap each piece of fish in the paste, press the edges closely, and fry the fillets in hot fat over a slow fire till they are brightly browned. Drain them from the fat, and serve on a dish in a circle, with one fillet overlapping another. Pour cold Tartar sauce (see SOLE, FILLETED, A LA TARTARE) into the centre, and serve. Time to fry the fillets, about half an hour. Probable cost, one large sole, 1s. or 1s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian fritter in all but name: sole fillets sealed in a thin egg pastry and deep-fried, served in a ring around cold tartare sauce. Two things need attention — the flour, and the absurd frying time.
- Ignore the half-hourThin pastry around a half-fillet of sole is cooked through in six to eight minutes at most; the fish itself needs three or four. Half an hour in fat would leave you with a dark shell and dry, shrunken fish. Fry until the paste is an even golden brown and lift them out.
- "A slow fire" means moderate fatNot fiercely hot -- the recipe gives no temperature, but a modern deep-fat equivalent is in the region of 325-340F. Hotter and the pastry colours before the fish inside has set; much cooler and the paste absorbs fat. Fry in batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Biscuit flourA fine, soft, low-gluten white flour of the sort used for plain biscuits and crackers. Plain (all-purpose) flour works; a mix of three parts plain flour to one part cornflour gets closer to the short, crisp texture intended. Bread flour will make the casing tough.
- The eighth of a pintAn eighth of an imperial pint (20 fl oz) is 2 1/2 fl oz, about 70 ml, or a scant third of a cup. Add it gradually and hold a little back; the paste should be stiff enough to roll very thin without tearing.
- Sealing the edgesPress firmly and brush the join with a little beaten egg or water before closing. If steam escapes, the parcel opens in the fat and the fish poaches in oil rather than in its own juices, which is the whole point of wrapping it.
- Dry the fish firstPat the seasoned fillets dry after rubbing with lemon. Wet fish inside pastry produces a soggy inner layer and increases the chance of a burst seam.
- The soleTrue Dover sole is expensive and often unavailable; lemon sole, plaice, flounder or any firm thin white fillet behaves the same way here. A large sole gives four fillets, each cut across into halves for eight pieces, which is what the stated four or five servings assumes.
- The sauceThe cross-referenced tartare sauce is a cold mayonnaise base. If you make it from scratch with raw yolks, use pasteurised eggs, or use a good bought mayonnaise with capers, gherkins and herbs stirred in.
- YieldAs stated, four or five as a first course; realistically two to three as a main with vegetables.
Cassell's arranges its material as a dictionary, so sole accumulates dozens of consecutive entries — à la Tartare among them — each a short variation cross-referencing its neighbours, which is why the sauce here is not written out. Sole was the prestige flatfish of the Victorian table, firm enough to fillet cleanly and to survive the rail journey inland, and a large one is priced at a shilling to eighteen pence. The label à l'Italienne is used loosely in nineteenth-century English cookery books and rarely means anything as precise as it sounds; here it seems to attach simply to the practice of enclosing the fish in paste before frying, a technique closer to the fried pastry parcels of Italian regional cooking than to the brown Italian sauce of French kitchen usage. Deep frying over an uneven coal range explains the generous half-hour: the cook was told to wait for colour, not to trust a clock, and modern controlled heat makes that instruction obsolete.