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Bread-crumbs (Half a gill of Tomato Sauce)
Half a gill of Tomato Sauce.
Peel and cut the tomatoes into thin slices, and lay over the sole alternately; sprinkle over this some salt and pepper, about one ounce of butter, and a few brown bread-crumbs, in which has been mixed a little Parmesan. Pour round the sole three tablespoonfuls of tomato sauce, cover with a buttered paper, and cook in a moderate oven about ten minutes.
This is the tail end of a longer sole recipe, so the fish itself is assumed to be already trimmed, skinned and laid in a buttered dish. Read it as a set of finishing instructions rather than a standalone method.
- Half a gillIn imperial measure a gill is a quarter-pint, so half a gill is about 2 1/2 fl oz, roughly five tablespoons. (An American gill is 4 fl oz, which would give 2 fl oz.) The method calls for only three tablespoonfuls poured round the fish, rather less than the ingredient line allows.
- A moderate ovenConventionally glossed today as about 350F/175C, though the book itself gives no figure. At that heat ten minutes will cook thin skinned fillets through but not a whole flat sole, which needs closer to 18-20 minutes. Judge by the flesh turning opaque and coming away from the bone at 145F.
- The buttered paperA sheet or round of paper, buttered and laid over the dish, sometimes directly on the fish as in a cartouche. It keeps the surface from drying while still letting the crumbs stay dry.
- Tomato thickness mattersSliced too thick, the tomatoes release water and dilute the sauce into a pink puddle. Cut them no more than 3mm, and salting the slices briefly on kitchen paper before laying them on the fish is worth the extra minute.
- Brown bread-crumbsIn period usage this may mean crumbs of brown or wholemeal bread, or crumbs dried and browned in the oven. Either way they are dry rather than fresh soft crumbs, which would absorb the butter and sit heavy.
- Parmesan quantityThe recipe gives no measure. Keep 'a little' sparing, so the cheese does not dominate a delicate fish.
- Sauce placementPour the tomato sauce round the fish, not over it, exactly as written. Over the top it would soak the crumb and cheese layer that the recipe has just built.
- YieldThe recipe gives neither the size of the sole nor a number of servings; a single sole dressed this way would commonly serve one or two.
Sole dressed with tomato, Parmesan and brown crumbs belongs to the Anglo-French repertoire that dominated British hotel and country-house cooking around 1900, when a professional kitchen was expected to produce a range of named variations on a single fish. Tomatoes had by then moved from suspicion to staple in British cookery, and a tomato sauce was a familiar item in the sauce cook's range, ladled round rather than over. The buttered paper is older still, a survival of the days before reliable oven thermostats, when a cartouche was one of the cook's defences against a fierce top heat. The odd title reflects how such books were compiled: ingredient lists ran in a margin beside the method, and the first line often got absorbed into the heading when the text was set or later digitised.