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Sole for a Convalescent
Take one fillet of a large fresh sole, sprinkle a little pepper and salt upon it, and put it into a saucepan with four table-spoonfuls of cold water. Bring the liquor gently to the boil, skim it, and simmer very gently till the fish is done enough. Take up the sole with an egg-slice, and place it on a hot dish. Stir the well-beaten yolk of a new-laid egg into the water, and whisk the sauce over the fire till it begins to thicken. Pour it over the fish, and serve immediately. Time to simmer the sole, eight to ten minutes. Probable cost, one large sole,1s. 6d. Sufficient for one person.
A single-portion poached fillet with the poaching liquor turned into a thin egg-yolk sauce. Almost everything hangs on heat control at the last step.
- The hinge: the sauce must not boilFour tablespoons of liquor thickened with one yolk is a liaison, not a custard. Take the pan off direct heat, whisk the yolk in, and return it only to gentle heat until it coats a spoon at around 160-170F. A boil scrambles it instantly and there is no rescuing so small a quantity.
- Ignore the eight to ten minutesThat timing suits a thick fillet from a very large sole or a whole fish. A typical sole fillet, quarter-inch thick, is opaque and set in two to four minutes at a bare shiver. Longer and it goes cottony, which defeats the point of a dish meant to be easy to eat.
- How little liquid this isFour tablespoons will not cover the fish. Keep the lid on so the fillet steams as much as poaches, and use the narrowest pan that will hold it flat, otherwise the liquor evaporates and there is nothing left to make the sauce with.
- Egg-sliceA flat perforated fish slice. Any thin, wide slotted spatula does the job; the fillet is fragile once cooked and will break on a fork.
- "New-laid egg"A freshness instruction, from an era of eggs of uncertain age. The yolk here reaches a set temperature but never a hard-cooked one, so for someone genuinely ill, elderly or pregnant, use a pasteurised egg.
- Seasoning and finishThe sauce as written is water, salt, pepper and yolk, and it will taste like it. Invalid cookery of the period often kept seasoning and rich additions to a minimum on digestibility grounds, though butter, milk and cream do appear elsewhere in the genre; if you are cooking for someone well, a squeeze of lemon and a knob of butter whisked in off the heat costs nothing in delicacy.
- Cost and yieldOne shilling and sixpence for a large sole marks this as an expensive dish in its day. As written it feeds one and takes under fifteen minutes start to finish.
Invalid cookery was a recognised category in nineteenth-century English household books, with its own small apparatus of feeding cups and the like, and Cassell's carries a run of such dishes. Sole was the standard fish of the sickroom: white, lean, boneless once filleted, mild enough not to offend a dulled appetite, and generally reckoned by Victorian medical opinion to be among the more digestible of flesh foods. The rules of the genre are all visible here in miniature: no frying, no butter or thickened flour sauce, no strong seasoning, the smallest possible quantity so nothing is left staring at the patient, and a plain enrichment with egg yolk, at a time when eggs were widely regarded as almost medicinal nourishment. The technique itself, whisking a raw yolk into hot cooking liquor to bind it, is the classical liaison, and it is the same operation that finishes a blanquette, scaled down to a single spoonful or two.