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Lemon Juice (Chop the bones of the soles)
Chop the bones of the soles and cook in stock or water to make the stock for sauce. The oysters, mussels, and mushrooms should be cooked in this stock and strained out.
Dissolve an ounce of butter in a stewpan; add an ounce of flour, stir long enough to cook the flour, moisten with about a pint of white stock and liquor of the soles. Allow this to boil for ten minutes, skim well, and finish with a liaison of two yolks of eggs. Stir in bit by bit one ounce of butter and a few drops of lemon juice. Pass through a fine strainer or tammy-cloth and use as directed above.
Sauce Mousseline (Douce). (Sweet Mousseline Sauce.) Ingredients.
This is the sauce component of a larger sole dish — the instruction to "use as directed above" points back to the garnished fillets on the preceding page. Read as a standalone recipe, it is a fish velouté enriched with egg yolks, butter and lemon.
- The hinge: never boil after the liaisonOnce the two yolks go in, the sauce must not reach a simmer or the yolks will scramble and the sauce will break into grains. Take the pan off the heat, temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce, return them, and hold below about 180F while it thickens.
- Weights, not volumesAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; an ounce of flour is a scant quarter cup. Equal weights make a proper white roux. If the pint here is the British 20 fl oz, that is a little under 2 1/2 US cups of liquid in all, counting the sole liquor.
- Fish stock in 20 minutes, not an hourSole bones are delicate and turn bitter and glue-like with long boiling. Barely cover the chopped bones with cold water or light stock, bring up slowly, skim, and hold at a bare simmer for 20 minutes at most, then strain.
- Cook the garnish briefly and lift it outThe oysters and mussels are poached in that stock only until the oysters plump and the mussel shells open — a minute or two. Their liquor is the point; leave them in while the sauce reduces and they go rubbery. Mushrooms want three or four minutes.
- Grit and saltMussel and oyster liquor carries sand and is already salty. Strain it through muslin and settle it before use, and do not salt the sauce until the liaison is in and it has been tasted.
- Tammy-clothA tammy was a worsted cloth through which sauce was wrung by two people twisting the ends. A fine conical strainer, or a fine sieve lined with damp muslin, does the same job.
- Butter at the endThe final ounce of butter is worked in bit by bit for gloss, what later kitchens call monter au beurre. Note that the recipe strains after the butter is in, not before, and the sauce should not be reheated once finished.
- YieldPerhaps 2 cups of finished sauce. An egg-liaison sauce of this kind will not stand reheating; make it last and keep it warm in a bain-marie below a simmer.
This is a classic Norman treatment of sole — bone stock, oysters, mussels and mushrooms bound into a velouté finished with yolks, butter and a few drops of lemon — close to what nineteenth-century French kitchens called sauce normande, though the recipe never names the sauce and the classic version is usually given with cream. The method belongs to the grande cuisine: a roux-based mother sauce, enriched at two stages, and passed through a tammy so that nothing but a smooth glossy nappe reaches the plate. The stray heading "Lemon Juice" in the title, and the orphaned "Sauce Mousseline (Douce). Ingredients." at the end, are artefacts of how these books were set — recipes ran on without breaks, and page scans slice them mid-stream.