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Sole Pie
Take a pair of moderate-sized soles, or, if preferred, the remains of fried or boiled soles. Lift the flesh from the bones, and place it in layers in a buttered pie-dish. Between each layer put a few fresh or tinned oysters and the liquor; season the fish with pepper, salt, and pounded mace, and lay little pieces of butter here and there upon the top. A dozen oysters will be sufficient for a pound of sole. Cover the dish with good puff-paste, and bake in a moderate oven. When done, pour into the pie, through a strainer put into the hole at the top, as much white sauce as will moisten it. This sauce may be prepared as follows. Make stock by boiling the fish-bones in as much water as will cover them. Strain the liquor, mix with it an equal quantity of cream, thicken with flour, and season it. The remains of cold cod may be made into a pie in the same way. When the pastry is baked the pie is done enough. Probable cost, soles, 1s. 6d. to 2s. per pair.
A late-Victorian way of stretching a pair of soles, or of rescuing yesterday's fried fish, under a puff-paste lid. It works, but the sauce and the pastry need to be handled as two separate jobs.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" here is 350-375F (175-190C). Puff paste actually wants a hotter start to lift, so 400F (200C) for the first 15 minutes and then down to 350F gives a better crust; the filling is already cooked fish and needs only to heat through.
- The hinge: the pie is done when the pastry is doneThe recipe says this outright and it is the whole point. Nothing in the dish requires long cooking, so judge by the lid — golden and risen, roughly 25-30 minutes — and take it out. Fish held longer than that in a covered dish turns dry and fibrous.
- Sauce goes in at the end, hotThe sauce is poured through the steam hole after baking, not before. Have it made and simmering as the pie comes out, and pour it in through a funnel or the small strainer the recipe specifies; hot sauce into a hot pie is less likely to sog the crust.
- Fish stock timingSole bones need 20 minutes at a bare simmer, no more. Longer extraction makes fish stock bitter and gluey. Strain it, then reduce if it tastes thin rather than boiling it longer on the bones.
- Thickening the sauce"Thicken with flour" means a roux or a beurre manié, not flour stirred in dry. Equal parts stock and cream is very rich by modern taste; half cream, half milk, thickened with a tablespoon of flour to each cup of liquid, gives a sauce that will run into the pie rather than sit on top of it.
- Pounded maceMace is the outer casing of the nutmeg, sold today as blades or ground. A scant quarter-teaspoon of ground mace for a pound of fish is plenty; it was a common Victorian seasoning for white fish and oysters, and more than a whisper of it dominates.
- OystersA dozen shucked oysters to a pound of sole is the stated ratio and it is a good one. Add them raw with their liquor, as the recipe directs, layered with the fish; they cook in the bake. Tinned oysters were available in Victorian Britain and are still sold.
- Sole and substitutesDover sole is expensive; lemon sole, plaice, witch or any firm flatfish fillet behaves the same way. Two moderate soles yield roughly a pound of flesh, which fills a pie for four.
- The price note"1s. 6d. to 2s. per pair" is the compiler's costing for late-Victorian London and has no modern equivalent worth calculating; it appears throughout Cassell's as a guide for household budgeting.
Fish pies under a paste lid were a fixture of the English kitchen long before Cassell's, and this version belongs squarely to the Victorian economy of leftovers: it allows in the first line that you may be working with "the remains of fried or boiled soles," and closes by suggesting cold cod will do as well. Oysters play their nineteenth-century role here as a cheap bulking agent rather than a luxury: before the English beds were fished out, oysters were common enough to be padding for beefsteak puddings and fish pies alike, and tinned oysters kept them within reach of the middle-class table after the fresh ones grew dear. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, first issued in parts in the 1870s and reissued in the "new" edition for decades afterwards, was aimed at exactly the household that would buy a pair of soles for under two shillings and expect to see them again the next day in another form.