Home › The Principles of Cookery › SOLE, FILLETS OF (au Vin Blanc)
SOLE, FILLETS OF (au Vin Blanc)
Take the fillets from a large skinned sole. Cut them through again, making eight fillets; season the inside with lemon-juice, salt, and pepper. Roll up, beginning with the narrow end, and tie with thread. Lay them in a buttered tin, squeeze a little lemon-juice over, and pour in a gill of white wine. Lay a buttered paper over, and cook until done, then put on a hot dish. Reduce the liquor in the pan by quick boiling, add a gill of bechamel, season delicately, and pour it over the fish.
A straightforward braise of rolled sole fillets in white wine, finished with the pan liquor enriched by béchamel. The original assumes you know how long fish takes and how hot the oven should be; both need stating.
- The hinge: do not overcookRolled sole fillets (paupiettes) are done when the flesh is opaque to the centre and just yielding — roughly 10-12 minutes for eight small rolls. Sole is lean and turns cottony within a couple of minutes of that point.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no oven and no heat at all: a buttered tin under buttered paper, 'cook until done'. If you bake it, a moderate oven of about 350F/180C works; the wine should barely tremble, not boil.
- A gillA quarter of a pint: 5 fl oz / about 150 ml (roughly two-thirds of a US cup). The recipe uses two of them — one of wine, one of b e chamel — so the finished sauce is modest, a coating rather than a pool.
- "A buttered tin"Any shallow ovenproof dish that holds the rolls snugly in a single layer. Crowding is helpful here: it keeps the small amount of wine deep enough to moisten the fish.
- The buttered paperA cartouche — parchment cut to the size of the dish, buttered side down, laid directly on the fish. It traps steam without sealing, which is why it is not the same as a lid or foil.
- FilletingA large sole yields two fillets per side; splitting each along the natural line gives the eight called for. Ask the fishmonger to skin and fillet, and keep the bones for the béchamel if you want more depth. Lemon sole, dab or plaice all substitute.
- TyingCotton kitchen twine, not sewing thread, and cut the loops before serving. A cocktail stick through each roll works as well and comes out more easily.
- Reducing and finishingBoil the pan liquor hard until it is syrupy and a couple of tablespoons remain, then whisk in the béchamel off the heat. Adding the sauce to unreduced wine gives a thin, sharp result.
- YieldOne large sole, eight fillets — two servings as a main course, four as a first course.
Au vin blanc is one of the standard classical treatments of sole, and its logic is entirely French: cook the fish in a small quantity of wine, then make the sauce out of the liquid the fish gave up. It demonstrates a method — the reduction of a cooking liquor into a sauce — as much as it produces a dish. Sole was the prestige flatfish of the late-Victorian and Edwardian table, Dover sole above all, and a great many of the named preparations in English cookery books of the period (Colbert, Normande, Bonne Femme) are borrowings from Parisian restaurant practice. The béchamel finish, rather than the egg-yolk-and-butter liaison a French kitchen might use, can be read as an anglicising touch: sturdier, more forgiving, and within reach of a household cook working without a saucier.