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SOLE, FILLETS OF (Turkish fashion)
Take off and saute the fillets. Have some rice swelled and made soft in good consomme; mix it with a few spoonfuls of good bechamel, to put in the centre of the dish: this rice must be thick, in order that it may be dished in a pyramid. To mask or cover the soles, take three spoonfuls of bechamel mixed with a quarter of a pound of butter, a tea-spoonful of caviare, and a little salt and pepper. Work this sauce well, and cover the fillets only. The rice is to form the centre of the dish. Probable cost, 2s.
A dish of three separate operations — sautéed fillets, a rice mound bound with béchamel, and a caviare butter used as a coating rather than a pool. The sauce is the part that fails if rushed.
- The hinge: the caviare butterThree spoonfuls of bechamel beaten with 4 oz butter is essentially a mounted butter sauce, and excessive heat will make it separate; keep it warm rather than hot. Work the cold butter into warm bechamel off the heat, and add the caviare last so the eggs stay whole rather than dissolving into grey specks.
- "Spoonfuls"The recipe specifies a "tea-spoonful" of caviare separately, so the unqualified spoonfuls are most likely tablespoons. Three tablespoons of bechamel to a quarter pound of butter gives a very thick coating sauce — right for masking, far too rich to serve as a pouring sauce.
- Mask, do not drown"Cover the fillets only" is a real instruction: the sauce is spooned over the fish so it clings, and the rice pyramid is left plain white in the centre. Spoon it on while the fish is hot and let the residual heat gloss it.
- SaltCaviare is salty and béchamel is already seasoned. Taste the finished sauce before adding any of the salt called for; often none is needed.
- The riceSimmer long-grain or a short round rice in good consommé until it is soft and starchy — deliberately overcooked by pilaf standards, since it must hold a shape. Bind with a couple of spoonfuls of béchamel so it can be pressed into a mould or a cone with a spoon.
- Filleting and sautéingFilleting and sauteing -- the fillets dried, lightly floured, and cooked in clarified butter over moderate heat — about 2 minutes a side for thin fillets. They are done when opaque and just firm; longer and they weep and toughen.
- Caviare to buyThe recipe assumes sturgeon roe. Wild sturgeon are now protected and most caviare on the market is farmed; a good lumpfish or trout roe will read as salty rather than nutty and needs a lighter hand.
- Yield and costThe recipe gives no yield; as written it would plausibly serve two generously or four as a first course. The "probable cost, 2s." is the book's price guide for its own day and has no modern equivalent — caviare was the expensive part then as now.
Cassell's belongs to the late-Victorian wave of large household dictionaries that translated professional French kitchen practice for middle-class cooks with one servant and a coal range. The name is the giveaway: in that kitchen vocabulary à la turque, "Turkish fashion," pointed to rice rather than to anything actually cooked in Constantinople — rice as the starch instead of potato. Sturgeon caviare was then a luxury import but an unremarkable one on a good fishmonger's slab, which is why the book can toss a teaspoonful into a butter sauce without ceremony. The construction itself is thoroughly French: a béchamel, a mounted butter, and fillets masked rather than sauced, with the rice moulded into a pyramid in the middle of the dish in the manner of the period's set-piece service.