Home › The Principles of Cookery › SOLE, FILLETS OF (au Gratin)
SOLE, FILLETS OF (au Gratin)
Take four ounces of mushrooms, four ounces of parsley, and two ounces of shallot. Peel the mushrooms and the shallot, and wash the parsley, then mince the ingredients separately. Put half an ounce of butter into a saucepan with the minced shallot, a pinch of pepper, and a pinch of salt. Stir this briskly over the fire for five minutes, add the parsley and the mushrooms, and stir the mixture for five minutes longer; then pour it out. Butter a tin or silver baking-pan rather thickly, lay the herbs in it, place upon them a sole, neatly filleted and trimmed, and cover the fillets with finely-grated bread-crumbs. Put little pieces of butter here and there upon the fish, moisten it with a glassful of light wine, a tea-spoonful of anchovy, and a tea-spoonful of ketchup. Bake the sole until done enough. Serve it very hot in the dish in which it was cooked. If the surface is not sufficiently browned, hold a salamander or red-hot shovel over it for three or four minutes. Time to bake, about a quarter of an hour. Sufficient for four or five persons. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
This is a classic gratin in the old sense: the fish sits on a bed of chopped mushroom, shallot and parsley, is capped with crumbs and butter, and goes into the oven only long enough to set. Everything hinges on not overbaking the fillets.
- Oven and timeCassell's gives no temperature; a quarter of an hour implies a fairly brisk oven, around 400F. Sole fillets are thin, so check at 8 to 10 minutes and pull them the moment the flesh turns opaque and flakes. Fifteen minutes will suit thick double fillets but will dry thin ones.
- The herb bedCook the shallot mixture until the mushrooms have given up their liquid and the pan is nearly dry, otherwise the moisture pools under the fish and the crumb topping steams instead of browning. What you are making is close to a modern duxelles.
- Four ounces of parsleyThat is a very large bunch, weighed with stalks. Pick the leaves and use the 4 oz as an upper limit; a modern palate is usually happier with half, since the parsley here is a bulk ingredient rather than a garnish.
- Peeling mushroomsVictorian cookery books routinely direct peeling, as this one does. Today wiping is enough; peeling only wastes flesh.
- "A tea-spoonful of anchovy"This means anchovy essence, the bottled savoury extract of the period. Anchovy paste or one mashed salted anchovy fillet does the same job.
- "Ketchup"In a British book of this date ketchup means mushroom ketchup, a thin dark salty liquid, not tomato sauce. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; Worcestershire sauce is the nearest common substitute, used sparingly.
- A glassful of light wineA wineglassful of this period was nearer 2 fl oz than a modern glass, so read this as somewhere between 2 and 4 fl oz of a dry white. Much more and the crumbs will not crisp.
- Salamander or red-hot shovelBoth were used to brown a surface from above. Your broiler, or grill, does it in two or three minutes; watch it, as buttered crumbs go from gold to black quickly.
- ServingBake and serve in the same dish, as directed. The book specifies a tin or silver baking-pan; a shallow enamelled or ceramic gratin dish works and holds heat well at the table. Four to five as a course, two as a main.
Au gratin in nineteenth-century English cookery books did not usually mean cheese, and it did not mean a casserole; it meant a dish browned in its own baking vessel, and the bed of minced mushroom, shallot and parsley beneath the fish is close to what French kitchens called a gratin preparation. Sole was a prestige flatfish in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and Cassell's quotes 2s 6d for a dish serving four or five. Two details are characteristic of the period: anchovy essence and mushroom ketchup, the bottled savoury liquids that stood in British larders before tomato ketchup displaced the mushroom kind, and the salamander, a long-handled iron plate heated in the fire and held over food to glaze it, which the book cheerfully allows you to replace with a red-hot coal shovel.