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SOLE IN CREAM (a delicate and delicious dish)
Take a pair of moderate-sized soles, scale and skin them, and clean them with scrupulous care. Put them into a saucepan of boiling water, and let them simmer gently for two minutes. Take them up, drain them, and put them into a clean saucepan. Pour over them as much sweet cream as will barely cover them, add a little salt and cayenne, a pinch of pounded mace, and an inch or two of lemon-rind, and let them simmer gently until done enough. Take them up with a slicer, and place them upon a hot dish. Thicken the cream with a little arrowroot, stir a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice into it, and pour it over the fish. It may seem unnecessary that the soles should be boiled for a minute or two in water before they are put into the cream, but it will be found that if this is not done the sauce will have a slightly unpleasant fishy flavour. Time to simmer the fish, eight to ten minutes. Sufficient for four or five persons. Probable cost, soles, 1s. 6d. to 2s. per pair.
A poached fish in a reduced cream sauce, and unusually for a Victorian fish recipe it explains its own logic. Two things decide whether it works: the initial two-minute blanch, and keeping the cream below a boil.
- Do not skip the blanchThe book explains itself here: two minutes in boiling water rinses off the substances that would otherwise carry a fishy flavour into the cream, and the author states plainly that without it the sauce tastes unpleasantly of fish.
- "Sweet cream" means fresh creamIn nineteenth-century usage sweet cream is simply cream that has not soured. Use heavy or double cream, at least 36 percent fat; single cream or half-and-half is more likely to break when reduced and acidulated with lemon juice.
- A pair of moderate solesPerhaps 12 to 14 oz each, whole, skinned. Dover sole is the likeliest fish meant; lemon sole, dab or flounder all work. If you use fillets instead, cut the poaching time to 3 or 4 minutes and blanch them for no more than 30 seconds.
- "Until done enough"The stated eight to ten minutes is for whole fish in barely simmering cream. The flesh should lift cleanly from the backbone at the thickest point; past that it shreds and the sauce clouds.
- Keep the cream at a bare trembleA rolling boil will split the cream and, once the lemon juice goes in, curdle it outright. Very low heat, no lid; the book does not say so, but adding the juice off the heat at the very end is the safer course.
- Mace and lemon rindPounded mace is the ground outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and less sharp; about an eighth of a teaspoon. Pare the rind in strips with no white pith and fish them out before serving.
- ArrowrootAbout a teaspoon, slaked in a spoonful of cold cream or water before it goes in. Arrowroot thickens almost immediately and turns stringy if held at heat, so stir it in over the lowest flame and serve at once. Cornstarch works but gives a duller, chalkier sauce.
- A slicerA fish slice, that is, a wide thin offset spatula. Whole poached sole falls apart on a fork; lift it supported along its whole length.
- YieldFour to five as the book says, which assumes fish as one course among several. As a main course it serves two to three.
Sole poached in cream belongs to the tradition of English fish cookery that grew up alongside the Victorian rail network, which for the first time brought Dover sole from the Channel ports to inland kitchens in edible condition. Sole was the prestige flatfish of the period, praised in cookery writing for firm flesh that held its shape, and the price quoted here of 1s. 6d. to 2s. a pair marks it as a comfortable middle-class purchase rather than a cheap one. The arrowroot finish is characteristic of the era too: it is often said to have been the genteel thickener, lighter than a flour roux and prized for leaving sauces clear and glossy.