Home › Dressed Fish › One Clove Garlic
One Clove Garlic
Half a pint of Melted Butter Sauce.
Skin and fillet the soles. Fold them, by placing each fillet round the left thumb and twisting the two ends tightly together. Put them on to a small baking sheet, previously buttered. Sprinkle them with a little salt and lemon-juice, cover with buttered paper, and bake in a hot oven for ten minutes. When done, roll the filets of sole in brown bread-crumbs. Dish in a circle, put a round pat of Maître d'Hôtel butter on the top of each, pour sauce round, and serve hot.
A late-Victorian dish of rolled sole fillets, baked rather than fried, finished with maître d'hôtel butter. The heading is a stray line from the ingredient list that ran alongside the method — the garlic belongs to the seasoning, not to the title.
- The hinge: ten minutes is the whole recipeThin sole fillets rolled into paupiettes cook through in eight to twelve minutes at high heat. Take them out when the flesh is opaque and just parts; sole overcooked by three minutes turns cottony and weeps liquid onto the sheet.
- "A hot oven"No temperature is given. A hot oven in period English cookery is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F; 425F works here, with the fillets covered by buttered paper, which steams as much as it bakes and keeps the surfaces from drying.
- Half a pint of melted butter sauceAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. "Melted butter sauce" is not melted butter — it is the standard English flour-and-butter white sauce made with water, milk or fish stock, closer to a thin béchamel.
- Maître d'hôtel butterButter creamed with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, rolled in paper, chilled firm and cut into rounds. Make it hours ahead; a soft pat slumps into the sauce before it reaches the table.
- Brown bread-crumbsDry crumbs browned in the oven to a light tan and sieved; period usage may mean crumbs of brown or wholemeal bread, or simply white crumbs dried and coloured in the oven. Not the raw white crumbs sold today, and not panko. They are meant as a dry coating on a moist fillet, applied after cooking, so they must be quite fine or they will simply fall off.
- Folding the filletsWind each fillet round the thumb as directed; a cocktail stick through the join holds the shape better than twisting alone. Remove the sticks before dishing.
- YieldTwo soles give eight fillets and serve four as a first course or two as a main. Pour the sauce around the ring of paupiettes, never over them, or the crumbs go to paste.
Sole was the prestige flatfish of the British table, and by the 1890s cookery schools are generally said to have taught filleting and rolling as a basic drill: the paupiette, or fillet wound into a cylinder, let a cook turn two fish into an elegant circle of eight identical portions. This recipe belongs to the anglicised French repertoire that dominated "high class" cookery of the period — maître d'hôtel butter and melted butter sauce were both stock items a well-run kitchen would likely have had to hand, and a dish was largely defined by which of them it received. The instruction to bake under buttered paper rather than deep-fry is a mark of the lighter, more digestible style promoted in the later Victorian schools, and the coating of brown crumbs applied after cooking gives the look of a fried fillet without the fat. The stray title "One Clove Garlic" appears to be an artefact of the printing, though its origin cannot be established from the page itself.