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Lemon-juice (Fillet the soles fold them)
Fillet the soles, fold them over, put them on a buttered tin, cover them with a buttered paper to prevent them from burning, and cook in the oven.
Melt the butter in a stewpan; add the flour and fish-stock; when well cooked, add the cream, salt, cayenne, and lemon-juice. Chop up the truffles, yolks of eggs, and parsley finely; pound the coral in the mortar, and pass through a hair-sieve. Next arrange the soles on a dish, pour the sauce over; ornament each fillet, thus: one with truffles, one with eggs, one with coral, another with parsley, so on alternately.
The book's running heads have separated this method from its ingredient list, so quantities for the sauce are missing; the proportions below are the ones the wording implies. Everything hinges on not overcooking the fillets, which need only minutes.
- What is missingNo amounts survive on this page. A velouté of this type works at about 1 oz butter to 1 oz flour to 1/2 pint (1 cup) fish stock, finished with 2-3 tablespoons cream, salt, a pinch of cayenne and lemon juice to taste. Treat those as reconstruction, not as the original.
- Buttered paperParchment or greaseproof cut to fit and buttered on the underside, laid over the fish. The recipe's stated purpose is to stop the fillets burning; it also keeps the surface from drying and colouring. Foil traps too much steam.
- Oven and timingThe recipe gives neither. As a modern equivalent, folded sole fillets do well in a moderate oven, around 350-375F, for roughly 8-10 minutes depending on thickness. They are done when the flesh has just turned opaque and gives no resistance at the fold. "Cook in the oven" assumed a cook watching them; overcooked sole turns cottony and weeps water into the sauce.
- Folding the filletsSkin the fillets, season lightly, and fold each in three or in half with the skinned side inward so the outer surface stays smooth. Set them close together on the buttered tin so they hold their shape.
- CoralThe coral is the roe of a hen lobster, which turns scarlet on cooking. Here it is pounded in a mortar and passed through a hair-sieve, as directed, to give a dry crimson powder for decoration. If you cannot get it, sieved cooked lobster or crab roe, or paprika-tinted sieved egg white, gives the same visual note.
- TrufflesFresh black truffle is the intention, though tinned truffle peelings were also available in the period. Finely chopped, they are here for colour contrast as much as flavour; a very small quantity is enough.
- The sauceCook the roux and stock together properly before the cream goes in, as directed, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. The recipe adds the lemon juice with the cream; adding it last, off the heat, keeps the flavour sharper, as it dulls if held over heat.
- AssemblySauce the dish while both fish and sauce are hot, then decorate immediately. Each garnish goes on a single fillet, alternating around the dish, so the effect is a band of colour per portion rather than a mixture.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. On the basis of four fillets to a sole, two soles would give eight fillets, enough for four as a fish course. Serve at once; the decoration bleeds into the sauce if the dish stands.
This belongs to the late-Victorian and Edwardian cookery-school tradition, where "high-class" meant food built to French professional method and served in the English manner: a plain-poached or oven-set fillet, a flour-thickened velouté, and a decoration of chopped truffle, sieved egg yolk, sieved lobster coral and parsley. That quartet of garnishes recurs across the period's cold-larder work, on chaud-froid galantines and aspic-glazed salmon, each colour holding distinct -- black, yellow, red and green -- against a pale sauce. Sole was a favoured fish for such dishes, its firm fillets folding and handling without breaking. The lobster coral, treated here as something simply to hand, assumes a kitchen breaking down whole hen lobsters often enough to have roe available.