Home › The Principles of Cookery › SOLE, STUFFED AND BAKED (a Portuguese recipe)
SOLE, STUFFED AND BAKED (a Portuguese recipe)
Make a little forcemeat as follows. Mince very finely six ounces of lean veal or beef thoroughly freed from skin and fat. Mix with it two ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs which have been soaked in milk and squeezed dry, and two ounces of shredded suet, butter, or fat bacon that has been slightly fried. Pound the ingredients in a mortar with one fillet of anchovy, a table-spoonful of picked and chopped parsley, a small onion, and a flavouring of pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Bind the mixture together with the yolk of an egg. Clean, skin, and fillet a large fresh sole. Squeeze a little lemon-juice upon the fillets, spread the forcemeat upon them, roll them round, and tie them with twine. Put the rolls in a buttered dish, brush over with beaten egg, strew bread-crumbs over them, and put into the dish under them a cupful of gravy mixed with what remains of the egg, a tea-spoonful of caper vinegar, a filleted anchovy, and a tea-spoonful of shredded parsley. Cover the dish tightly, and bake the rolls in a gentle oven. When done enough, put the rolls into a hot dish, strain the gravy over, and garnish with fried parsley. Sometimes the rolls are dipped in French frying-batter, and fried till crisp, then baked afterwards. Time to bake the fish, about ten minutes. Probable cost, one large sole, 1s. or 1s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian dictionary entry compressing two techniques into one paragraph: a pounded veal forcemeat and a shallow braise-bake of rolled sole fillets. Most of the work is in the stuffing.
- The forcemeat sets the cooking timeThe stuffing contains raw minced veal, so the ten minutes given is the time for the fish alone and is not enough once the fillets are rolled around it. Keep the rolls slim — a thin layer of forcemeat, not a fat log — and cook until the centre reaches 160F/71C, which will take nearer 20-25 minutes.
- "A gentle oven"Around 325F/165C. The dish is covered tightly and sits in gravy, so it is closer to a braise than a roast; the crumb coating will not brown much under the lid.
- Filleting a soleA large Dover sole yields four fillets, two from each side. Ask the fishmonger to skin and fillet it. Lemon sole, plaice or witch all work; flatfish fillets are what matter, not the species.
- Suet and fat baconShredded beef suet is sold in packets in Britain and is scarce elsewhere; cold grated butter or finely chopped streaky bacon, lightly fried as the recipe allows, does the same job of keeping the lean veal moist.
- Pounding without a mortarA food processor pulsed briefly gives the same smooth bind. Do not run it long enough to warm the fat, or the forcemeat will be pasty.
- Caper vinegarThe brine from a jar of capers. A teaspoon of it, or of white wine vinegar with a few capers chopped in, is the intended sharpness in the gravy.
- The gravyA cupful here is an unstandardised measure, somewhere between an imperial half-pint teacup and a modern 8 fl oz/240 ml. Victorian household gravy generally meant meat stock; a light chicken or fish stock is the sensible modern reading. It should come only part way up the rolls.
- Tying and servingButcher's twine or a wooden cocktail stick through each roll; remove before it goes to the table. Fried parsley means whole sprigs, dried thoroughly and dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stiffen and crisp.
- YieldFour to five as the original states, though a large sole stretched into five portions makes for small ones by current appetites; four is more realistic.
The recipe is flagged as Portuguese, which in a late-Victorian British dictionary of cookery may signal nothing more precise than "from the Peninsula" — the anchovy, the lemon juice and the veal forcemeat were all firmly part of the English repertoire by the 1870s. What is genuinely of its period is the forcemeat itself: a pounded paste of lean meat, soaked crumb, suet and an anchovy fillet, used here as a stuffing but of a kind interchangeable with the forcemeat balls and quenelles common in such books. Anchovy in a fish dish was standard English seasoning, the savoury depth that would later be got from bottled sauces. The costing — one shilling to eighteen pence for a large sole — belongs to a book that expected its readers to budget against printed prices.