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Browned Crumbs (Skin the sole cut off the fins)
Skin the sole, cut off the fins and the head and tail, and nick it with a knife on both sides. Dry it well; chop the parsley, shalot, and mushrooms and mix them together. Butter a dish, sprinkle half the chopped mushrooms, parsley, and shalot on the dish. Lay the sole on this seasoning, and sprinkle the rest of the parsley, &c., over the fish, Squeeze over a little lemon-juice, season with salt and pepper, and then shake over some breadcrumbs previously browned in the oven. Lay the butter in little bits here and there on the fish.
Put the sole in a moderate oven and bake it about ten minutes. Remove the fish on to a clean dish Warm up the sauce and pour it round the fish.
Sole au Gratin (No. 2).
Ingredients.
This is the classic sole au gratin, laid on a bed of chopped mushroom, parsley and shallot and finished with pre-browned crumbs. The ingredient list has been cut off mid-sentence on this page, so treat the amounts as your own judgement.
- Missing quantitiesThe original ingredient list is truncated after the word "Ingredients", so no weights survive here. For one Dover sole of about 12-14 oz, a reasonable working set is 4 oz mushrooms, a tablespoon of chopped parsley, one shallot, 1 oz butter and 2 tablespoons of browned crumbs.
- Brown the crumbs firstThis is the hinge of the dish. The crumbs go on already coloured, dried in the oven on a tray until sandy and golden, because ten minutes over a wet fish will not brown them. Raw crumbs give a pale, pasty top.
- "A moderate oven"In books of this kind that is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. Ten minutes at that heat will only just cook a thick whole sole; a hotter oven, nearer 400F for eight to ten minutes, keeps the crumbs crisp and stops the mushroom bed stewing.
- ShalotSimply the shallot, spelled as it was in Victorian and Edwardian kitchens. One small shallot is enough; it is there for sharpness under the mushrooms, not for onion flavour.
- Skinning and nickingThe recipe says only "skin the sole"; in practice the dark upper skin is the one usually taken off, the white underside often left on to help hold the fish together. The knife nicks on both sides let heat and seasoning in and help stop the fish curling as it bakes.
- DonenessThe fish is done when the flesh lifts cleanly from the backbone at the thickest point behind the head. Sole is lean and goes cottony fast, so check at eight minutes rather than trusting the clock.
- "Warm up the sauce"The sauce is assumed to be made in advance and is not described here. Something on the lines of a brown Italienne or a reduced fish veloute with white wine would suit; pour it round the fish, not over, so the crumbs stay dry.
- YieldOne sole of this size serves one generously or two as a first course. Bake in the dish it is served from if you can, since moving a baked whole sole intact takes two fish slices and a steady hand.
Au gratin in this period means what is browned in a dish rather than what is buried in cheese sauce; the mushroom, shallot and parsley bed is essentially a duxelles, the mixture credited by tradition to the kitchen of the Marquis d'Uxelles in seventeenth-century France and taken up in the nineteenth by Careme and his successors. British high-class cookery of the late Victorian and Edwardian decades was written largely in this French idiom, and Dover sole was among its favoured fish: firm enough to bake whole and hold its shape, prized enough to justify a made sauce warmed separately and poured round at the table.