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Four Mushrooms
One Sole. Half a gill of Stock. Half a Shalot. Half an ounce of Butter.
Half teaspoonful of chopped Parsley.
Two tablespoonfuls of Brown Sauce.
Skin the sole and place in a gratin dish, pour a little stock over the fish, and add small pieces of butter here and there on the fish. Place the fish in the oven to partially cook it. Fry the mushroom and shalot in the butter, add parsley, brown sauce, a very little sherry, seasoning, a little glaze, and liquid from sole. Cover the fish with the sauce, sprinkle over a few crumbs, add small pieces of butter as before, and finish cooking in the oven.
A late-Victorian gratin de sole, written for a cook who already knew the drill: partial bake, finish under a coating sauce and crumbs. The ingredient list has come down to us truncated, so a few quantities have to be reconstructed.
- The missing ingredientsThe heading "Four Mushrooms" appears to be the first line of an ingredient list that also included a sole, a shalot, stock, sherry and glaze — none of which are quantified in the text that survives. Only the butter (half an ounce, about 15 g), the parsley and the two tablespoons of brown sauce are given; the quantity of fish and the yield are guesswork.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as is usual in books of this kind. A gratin of this sort wants a fairly brisk oven — 400-425F (200-220C) is a reasonable modern setting — so the crumbs colour in the time the fish needs.
- The hinge: two stages, not oneThe sole goes in barely covered with stock and dotted with butter, comes out underdone, and is then sauced and returned. The point is that the liquid it gives up in the first stage goes into the sauce. Skip it and the sauce is thin and the fish waterlogged.
- Total cooking timeA skinned sole, whole or filleted, cooks through in roughly 8-12 minutes at that heat. The recipe only says to part-cook it first and finish it after saucing, without indicating how the time divides; judge it done when it flakes at the thickest part.
- Brown sauce and glaze"Brown sauce" here is a reduced espagnole or demi-glace, and "glaze" is meat stock boiled down to a syrup — both were standing preparations in a professional kitchen. Reduced veal or beef stock, or a good commercial demi-glace, stands in; bottled table sauce does not.
- "A very little sherry"A teaspoon or two. The recipe adds it after the parsley and brown sauce, not before; since the sauce is only a couple of tablespoons, more would dominate it.
- Skinning the soleThe dark skin lifts off in one piece from the tail end if you nick it and pull against a cloth. Ask the fishmonger to do it, and to leave the fish whole on the bone if you want it to hold together in the dish.
- CrumbsDry white breadcrumbs, sprinkled thinly — a thick layer will not colour evenly in the short second bake. The butter dotted over them is what browns them.
Sole prepared au gratin was a fixture of British and Anglo-French cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the method here — part-bake, then finish under a mushroom-and-shallot brown sauce with crumbs — is a standard restaurant treatment. The dependence on two ready-made preparations, brown sauce and glaze, marks this as a recipe from a professional or well-staffed kitchen: both are said to have required long simmering and were kept on hand, so the cook writing this saw them as pantry items rather than projects. Dover sole was the prestige flatfish of the period. The truncated ingredient list is a common artefact of these books, where quantities were often set in a narrow column beside the method and may easily be lost in transcription.