Home › Dressed Fish › Chopped Truffles (Skin and fillet the soles lay)
Chopped Truffles (Skin and fillet the soles lay)
Skin and fillet the soles; lay some lobster mixture on the half of each fillet, fold them over in half with the skin inside, and put them on a buttered baking sheet; squeeze a little lemon on each fillet, cover them with buttered paper, and bake for ten minutes. Dish up, garnish with six prepared mussels or bearded oysters, and serve with sauce Cardinal.
Sole à l'Horly.
Ingredients.
A short professional-kitchen instruction that assumes you already have lobster forcemeat and sauce Cardinal to hand. The trailing line "Sole à l'Horly. Ingredients." belongs to the next recipe in the book, not this one.
- The hinge: don't overbakeFolded sole fillets are thin, and the original allows ten minutes; it specifies no oven temperature. Take them out while the flesh is just opaque and still yielding; the residual heat under the paper will finish them, and a further two minutes turns them cottony.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche — parchment cut to the size of the tray, one side buttered, laid directly on the fish. It traps steam and stops the surface drying. Buttered foil works; a lid does not, since it lets the fillets stew in their own liquor.
- "Lobster mixture"In a book of this kind, cooked lobster meat chopped fine and bound with a very thick béchamel or panada, seasoned and often enriched with lobster coral. It must be stiff and cold before it goes on the fillet, or it will slump out as the fish curls.
- Skin insideThe skinned side of a fillet contracts more in the heat. Folding with that side inward keeps the parcel from springing open and losing the filling.
- Sauce CardinalA fish velouté or béchamel finished with lobster butter and a little cream, coloured with coral, sometimes with chopped truffle. The name is traditionally explained by its red colour. Make it before the fish goes in the oven; it will not wait for you afterwards.
- Bearded oysters and mussels"Bearded" means the dark frill of gill and beard has been trimmed away. Mussels are steamed open, oysters barely poached in their own liquor for a minute or so. Anything longer and they shrink to rubber, which defeats the point of a garnish.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. Reckon one Dover sole per person for four fillets, or two fillets each as a first course, with roughly a tablespoon of lobster mixture per fillet and about 150ml of sauce per two people.
- LemonA squeeze on each fillet before the paper goes on, not after. It seasons the flesh as it steams; added at the table it flattens the lobster butter in the sauce.
Sole treated this way — filleted, stuffed with a shellfish forcemeat, folded, gently baked under paper and sent up with a coral-red sauce — is broadly of a piece with the Anglo-French repertoire that Escoffier codified around the turn of the twentieth century, and which British "high class cookery" manuals of the same decades taught to cooks in large private houses. Sauce Cardinal is often said to take its name from the colour of a cardinal's robes, the red coming from lobster coral and lobster butter rather than any tomato. The recipe's brevity is the real period detail: it presumes a kitchen where the fish larder, the sauce and the garnish are separate stations, so the writer need only give the assembly.