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SOLE, FILLETS OF (a la Windham)
Cleanse, wash, and fillet a pair of soles, roll up the fillets neatly, and tie them with tape. Put the fillets into cold water, bring slowly to the boil, and boil for three minutes. Drain them, and have ready half a pint of bechamel sauce very hot; put in the fillets, and simmer them for ten minutes, then add half a pint of green peas freshly cooked, season with pepper and salt, and mix well. Dish the fillets neatly, remove the tapes, pour the sauce over, and serve very hot.
A straightforward late-Victorian fish dish whose only difficulty is the fish itself: sole fillets rolled and boiled are easy to overcook into cotton wool.
- The hinge: total cooking timeThree minutes in water followed by ten minutes in sauce is far more than thin sole fillets need. Poach the paupiettes gently until just opaque — four to six minutes total for average fillets — then warm them through in the sauce for a minute or two rather than simmering them.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Read both the bechamel and the peas that way.
- TapeCotton tape is what the recipe calls for, and it appears commonly in Victorian instructions for rolled fillets. Kitchen string works, but rolled sole fillets stood upright in a shallow pan generally hold their shape unaided, or can be secured with a cocktail stick.
- BechamelIn Victorian usage, bechamel generally meant a white sauce built on a veal or chicken stock enriched with milk or cream, not the plain milk-and-flour sauce the word now means. A modern bechamel loosened with a little of the fish poaching liquid gives the closer flavour.
- Cold water startBringing fish up slowly from cold was the period method for keeping it whole. It also gives you no control over the finish; a pan of barely trembling salted water or court bouillon, fish added to it, is easier to judge.
- Green peas freshly cookedMeans peas boiled separately and drained, added at the end for colour. Frozen peas cooked for two minutes are a fair substitute; do not let them sit in the hot sauce or they grey.
- YieldA pair of soles gives eight fillets, four per fish, enough for four as a main course or more as a light first course.
- SoleDover sole is the intended fish. Lemon sole, witch or plaice fillet all roll and poach the same way, though they are thinner and cook faster still.
Cassell's is full of fish dishes labelled "à la" something — a habit borrowed wholesale from the French service that dominated English hotel and club cookery in the second half of the nineteenth century, where a garnish or sauce was fixed to a name and the name then travelled from menu to cookbook. Windham (or Wyndham) is one of many such tags whose origin is not documented in the book itself; it may commemorate a patron or a house, but the dictionary offers no explanation and none should be assumed. What the recipe does record reliably is the Victorian fondness for the paupiette: a fillet rolled, tied, poached and sauced, valued because it turned a flat, awkward piece of fish into a neat upright shape that could be arranged on a dish. Sole was the prestige flatfish of the period, landed at Dover and Grimsby and carried inland by rail, which is why an English household dictionary could assume a cook would buy them in pairs.