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SOLE, FRIED IN OIL (to be eaten cold)
Clean, scale, skin, empty, trim, and dry a moderate-sized sole, and brush it over with beaten egg. Put six table-spoonfuls of best Lucca oil in a frying-pan, let it get quite hot, then put in the fish. Let it remain for five minutes, turn it over, and then leave it in five minutes longer. Drain it well, put it aside, and serve cold. Time to fry the sole, ten minutes. Probable cost, 1s. or 1s. 6d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A plain shallow-fry with no coating but egg, meant to be eaten at room temperature or cold — a supper or picnic dish rather than a hot course.
- The hinge: dry the fish, then egg itSix tablespoons of oil is a shallow film, so the egg is the whole crust. Pat the sole completely dry before brushing, or the egg slides off and the flesh steams instead of browning.
- Lucca oilLucca in Tuscany was the standard Victorian byword for fine table olive oil, sold in tall flasks by grocers and chemists alike. Any good olive oil works; a mild one is closer to what was meant than a peppery new-harvest oil.
- Oil temperatureThe book gives no temperature. In practice "quite hot" means hot enough that the egg sets on contact; roughly 350-375F is a reasonable modern target. Below that the fish absorbs oil and goes greasy, which is far more obvious once cold.
- Ten minutes is generousThe book gives no weight. A moderate sole on the bone needs roughly three to four minutes a side in a hot pan; fillets need two. Ten minutes total suits a thick fish and will overcook a small one, and overcooked sole turns cottony as it cools.
- SkinningThe recipe says only "skin", without specifying one side or both. Practice now is to remove only the dark top skin and leave the white; either is fine here, but the white skin helps the fish hold together when turned in shallow oil.
- Draining for a cold dishDrain on a rack rather than paper, and let it cool uncovered. Sitting on a plate in its own oil is what makes cold fried fish taste heavy.
- ServingServes two to three as written. Cold fried sole wants sharpness alongside — lemon, capers, a vinaigrette, or a cut of good bread and butter.
- Cost"1s. or 1s. 6d." is one shilling to eighteen pence, a period price note of no use as a conversion but a fair indication that sole was a middling rather than luxury buy.
Fish fried in oil and served cold is one of the clearest traces of Anglo-Jewish cooking in mainstream Victorian cookery books: the technique, which keeps well because oil stays liquid rather than congealing as butter or dripping does, was long associated with the Sephardi households of London's East End, and is generally traced through them into the English fried-fish trade and eventually into fish and chips. Cassell's, compiled for a broad middle-class readership in the 1870s and after, prints it plainly among its sole recipes with no comment on its origin — a sign of how thoroughly the method had been absorbed. The insistence on "best Lucca oil" matters too: before the twentieth century olive oil in Britain was a specialist grocery item bought in small quantities, so specifying it signalled a dish worth the outlay.