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Sole, with Water Souchet
Take some fine fresh soles, scale the white side, and take the skin from the black side. Empty out all the intestines, and wash the fish thoroughly in several waters. When the soles are quite clean, boil them in water souchet, which should be prepared as follows. Take some roots of parsley, and cut them into slices about the eighth of an inch thick and an inch in length. Put these roots into some water with a bunch of parsley, green onions, and a little salt; let them stew for an hour, then stew the soles in this water. When the fish are done enough, have ready some parsley leaves, without the stalks, which have been blanched separately in salt and water. Drain the soles, and take care that the parsley roots are preserved. Put the fish into a tureen with some of the liquor in which they have been stewed, and which you should strain through a silk sieve. Throw in the parsley roots and leaves, and serve up the water souchet without any bread in it; but in a separate plate send to table a few slices of rye-bread and butter.
A clear poached-fish dish that lives or dies on restraint: the broth is barely flavoured, so anything overcooked or over-salted shows immediately.
- The hinge: don't stew the solesDespite the wording, the fish should be barely poached in the broth held just below a simmer. Fillets need 3-4 minutes, small whole soles 6-8; a rolling boil will shred the flesh and cloud the liquor.
- Parsley rootsThese are Hamburg or root parsley, a distinct variety grown for its pale taproot, still sold in Eastern European and some farmers' markets. Parsnip is not a match — it is far sweeter — but young parsnip cut very thin is the nearest common stand-in if root parsley is unavailable.
- Green onionsSpring onions or scallions. Use the whole thing, white and green, tied into the bundle with the parsley so it can be lifted out.
- An hour for the root brothThat is what the recipe calls for: the point is a thin, faintly aromatic liquor rather than a fish stock. Keep it at a bare simmer so it does not reduce too far.
- Silk sieveA fine-mesh strainer lined with muslin or a coffee filter. The dish is served in its broth, so clarity is the whole presentation.
- Blanching the leaves separatelyThirty seconds in salted water, then straight into cold, keeps the green bright. Added to the hot broth from the start they go olive-drab within minutes.
- Cleaning the fishAny fishmonger will skin and gut soles on request. If working from whole fish, the black skin pulls off in one piece from the tail end; the white side only needs scaling.
- Yield and serviceAllow roughly one small whole sole or two fillets per person, served in a wide soup plate with a ladle of the broth. The recipe is explicit that the rye bread and butter goes to table on a separate plate rather than into the tureen.
Water souchet is an anglicisation of the Dutch waterzootje (roughly, a boiling of water), a fish-in-its-own-broth dish that crossed the North Sea and settled on the Thames. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was commonly served at the whitebait dinners held at the riverside taverns of Greenwich and Blackwall, where perch, flounder or sole was poached in a thin broth and sent to table with brown or rye bread and butter — the same pairing specified here. The instruction to serve it "without any bread in it" marks the distinction: souchet is a clear broth, not a thickened fish stew. Root parsley was familiar in British kitchen gardens then and is little used in Britain now.