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Sole, Filleted, with White Sauce
Fillet a large sole, and season the fillets with a little pepper and salt, grated nutmeg, grated lemon-rind, and finely-minced shallot. Put them into a saucepan, pour over them four ounces of clarified butter, and let them simmer ten minutes. Add the strained juice of a lemon and a glass of light wine; simmer five minutes longer, and serve the fish with good white sauce poured over it. Time to simmer the fish, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, one large sole, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A butter-poached sole in all but name, with a separately made white sauce spooned over at the table. The one thing to change is the clock.
- The timing is the hingeSole fillets from a large fish are 1/4 inch thick and are done in three to four minutes in barely trembling butter, five at the outside. The stated quarter of an hour will leave them dry and fibrous, and the lemon juice added at the end tightens the flesh further. Cook until the fillets turn opaque and just begin to flake, then hold them warm while you finish the liquid.
- Clarified butterFour ounces is half a cup (1 stick) of butter after clarifying, which means starting with a little more. Clarified butter is used here because the milk solids would scorch and speckle the pale fish; melted whole butter works if you keep the heat very low.
- A glass of light wineRead it as roughly 2 to 4 fl oz of a dry white; the recipe says only 'a glass', and Victorian wineglassful measures are usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz. 'Light wine' in Victorian usage generally means an unfortified table wine, as opposed to sherry or Madeira. A Muscadet, Chablis or dry Riesling suits the dish.
- Good white sauceMost likely a plain flour-and-butter white sauce cooked without colouring and let down with milk, simmered until it coats a spoon; Victorian white sauces are sometimes built on veal stock or a mixture instead. It is made in a separate pan; the poaching butter and wine in the fish pan can be reduced and whisked into it for more flavour, though the original does not say so.
- Buying the fishA "large sole" here is Dover sole, which yields four fillets. Lemon sole, witch or flounder fillets stand in acceptably; skinless tilapia does not, being too thick and too soft for this treatment.
- SeasoningsGrate the nutmeg and lemon rind directly over the fillets so the oils are not lost, and mince the shallot very fine, it will not soften much in ten minutes of gentle butter and coarse pieces stay raw and sharp.
- Yield and costFour or five portions is optimistic by modern standards; one large sole feeds two generously or three modestly as a main course. The 1s 6d is a late-nineteenth-century fishmonger's price and has no useful modern equivalent.
Filleted sole in butter with a white sauce belongs to the anglicised French cooking that filled English middle-class kitchens after Francatelli and Soyer, and it drills the two techniques a cook was expected to own: taking clean fillets off a flatfish, and making a bechamel that is smooth and unbrowned. Sole was among the prestige fishes of the Victorian table, alongside turbot and salmon, praised for firm white flesh that survived being handled, filleted and sauced, and the London supply from Dover and the North Sea reached inland towns quickly once the railways carried iced fish. The nutmeg and lemon rind are older seasonings than the sauce, and are often read as a survival of the eighteenth-century English habit of scenting fish with spice and peel, while the shallot and the glass of light wine mark the French influence layered on top.