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SOLE, STEWED (a maigre dish)
Skin, scale, and clean a large sole, and put it into a saucepan with an onion stuck with two cloves, fifteen black peppercorns, and as many berries of allspice. Pour upon it as much boiling water as will cover it, and let it simmer gently until done enough. Take the fish up carefully with a slicer, lay it on a hot dish, and keep it hot for a few minutes. Thicken the sauce with flour and butter, and-supposing there is half a pint-stir into it half a tea-spoonful of essence of anchovy, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, two table-spoonfuls of claret, and a pinch of cayenne. Let it boil till thick and smooth, strain it over the fish, garnish with toasted sippets, and serve very hot. Time to stew the sole, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for two persons.
A plainly built poached sole with a spiced court-bouillon turned into its own sauce. Only the timing and one or two Victorian storecupboard items need translating.
- Cut the cooking timeTwenty minutes will reduce a sole to cotton wool. A whole large Dover sole in barely simmering liquid is done in 8-10 minutes; fillets need 3-4. The flesh should just part from the backbone at the thickest point.
- Keep it at a shiver"Simmer gently" means no rolling boil at all -- bubbles barely breaking. Hard boiling shreds the fish and clouds the liquid you are about to make into sauce.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. If you have more cooking liquid than that after poaching, reduce it before thickening and scale the seasonings up or down accordingly.
- Flour and butterWork equal weights soft butter and flour into a paste -- beurre manié -- and whisk it into the hot liquid in small pieces. About 15 g of each per half-pint gives a light coating sauce.
- Essence of anchovyA thin commercial anchovy extract, closest today to anchovy paste from a tube or a mashed salted fillet. Half a teaspoon of paste is right; it should read as savoury depth, not fish.
- Mushroom ketchupNot tomato ketchup but a thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor, still sold by a few British makers. A dash of Worcestershire sauce or a spoonful of dark soy plus a little mushroom soaking liquid stands in reasonably.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter, tucked round the edge of the dish. Add them at the last moment or they go soft under the sauce.
- Strain the sauceThe onion, cloves, peppercorns and allspice go in whole and are never meant to reach the plate. Straining over the fish is the step that makes the dish look finished.
- YieldTwo, as stated, from one large sole -- a generous main course. The 2s. cost is late-Victorian money and no guide at all now.
Maigre is the French term for lean or fast-day cooking: food permitted on the days when the Church forbade meat, which for much of the year meant Fridays, Lent and the Ember days. Cassell's kept a running set of maigre dishes for readers who observed them, and fish poached in a spiced water rather than a meat stock is the archetype -- the flavour has to be built from cloves, allspice, anchovy and ketchup instead of broth. The sole itself was among the prestige flatfish of nineteenth-century Britain, landed heavily in the Channel and rushed inland by rail, which is why a book aimed at middle-class kitchens could treat a large one as a two-person supper. The claret and mushroom ketchup are pure Victorian storecupboard: bottled savoury essences were the era's shortcut to depth, and general cookery books of the period often assume several of them on the shelf.