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Sole, Mayonnaise
Fillet a pair of soles, roll them up and fasten them with thread, season with pepper, salt, and lemon-juice. Bake in rather a hot oven for eight minutes, basting with butter once or twice during the process. Let them get cold, then put a few drops of essence of anchovies over each fillet, and cover with thick mayonnaise sauce. Garnish with chillies and water-cress.
A cold fish dish that depends almost entirely on not overbaking the fillets and on the mayonnaise being stiff enough to sit on them without sliding off.
- "Rather a hot oven"The book gives no figures; in a modern oven this is usually taken as somewhere around 400-425F (200-220C). The fillets are thin and rolled, so they set quickly; eight minutes is plausible at that heat and they should be just opaque at the centre.
- A pair of solesDover sole yields four fillets per fish, so a pair gives eight small rolls — a first course for four. Lemon sole or plaice fillets work the same way; skin them before rolling.
- Fastening the rollsCotton thread was the Victorian answer and still works, but a wooden cocktail stick is easier to remove once the fish is cold. Roll skinned side inwards so the fillet holds its shape as it contracts.
- Essence of anchoviesA thin commercial anchovy extract, sold bottled throughout the period. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or a scant quarter-teaspoon of fish sauce per fillet, gives a similar salty note. A few drops is the correct dose -- it should not read as anchovy.
- Thick mayonnaiseThe sauce must be stiffer than a dressing: two egg yolks to roughly a cup of oil, with lemon juice rather than a large quantity of vinegar. If you are making it by hand and serving it uncooked to anyone vulnerable, use pasteurised eggs.
- Cooling and coatingChill the fillets thoroughly and pat off any butter or liquid before saucing, or the mayonnaise will slip. Coat no more than an hour or two ahead and keep refrigerated.
- The garnish"Chillies" here most likely means the small pickled chillies then sold in jars for garnishing cold dishes rather than fresh ones. Sliced pickled chilli or a few capers with the watercress reads correctly on the plate.
Cold fish under mayonnaise was a fixture of the late-Victorian supper and luncheon table, where dishes had to be prepared in advance and look composed on a sideboard. The logic is the same throughout: cook the fish plainly, cool it, mask it with a sauce that does the seasoning. Mayonnaise itself reached English cookery from French practice in the nineteenth century, and its name is traditionally traced to the Balearic port of Mahón, though that derivation is contested; earlier English books often spell it "mayonnaise sauce" as this one does. The bottled essence of anchovies is the period detail that dates the recipe most precisely — a manufactured savoury concentrate of the kind that filled Victorian store cupboards, used here in drops to give the bland sole a backbone the mayonnaise alone would not supply.