One French Roll
Clean, skin and trim two medium-sized soles, remove the fillets, fold in two, and place them in a buttered sauté-pan; season with pepper and salt, moisten with a gill of white wine, sprinkle with a finely chopped shalot, place a few bits of butter here and there, and cook it in the oven for about ten minutes.
Two Soles. Half a gill of White Wine. One Shalot. Twelve Oysters. Twelve Mussels. Twelve button Mushrooms. Have ready a garniture of prepared oysters, mussels, button mushrooms, and croûtes or fleurons. Put the fillets on a dish, dress the garnish neatly, sauce over with Normande sauce in which the garniture has been cooked; garnish the sides with croûtes of bread made from rasped French dinner rolls (buttered slices browned in the oven), or with fleurons. Serve with the remaining sauce separately in a boat. (For sauce for this see page 98.) P.S.-If smelts are in season, this dish should be garnished with a few fried smelts, in addition to the other garniture.
A late-Victorian sole Normande, written for a kitchen that had fish stock, a finished velouté and a pastry cook on hand. The dish stands or falls on the sauce, so read that page first and treat the fillets as a ten-minute job at the end.
- The hinge: the sauceNormande sauce is a fish velouté finished with the oyster and mussel liquor, egg yolks and cream. Once the yolks go in it must not boil or it will curdle and break; hold it below a simmer and add the reduced wine and cooking juices from the fillets off the heat.
- A gillIn an English cookery book, five imperial fluid ounces, roughly 140 ml (the American gill is 4 fl oz). That is enough to moisten a buttered pan of eight folded fillets, not to poach them; the fish should steam in wine and butter rather than swim.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; kitchen ranges of the period were not marked and heat was judged by experience. In modern terms folded fillets of sole want a hot oven, around 400F, for eight to ten minutes, and they are done when the flesh turns opaque and just parts. Thin fillets overcook in a minute or two, so check early.
- Prepared oysters and mussels"Prepared" means opened and barely cooked, with the liquor strained and kept for the sauce. Steam mussels only until the shells gape; oysters need no more than a minute in their own liquor. Both go leathery if held in hot sauce, so add them at the last moment.
- Sauté-panHere it means a shallow, straight-sided metal pan that goes from stovetop to oven, not a covered earthenware dish. Any ovenproof skillet wide enough to hold the fillets in one layer will do.
- Fleurons and rasped rollsFleurons are small crescents of puff pastry baked until golden. "Rasped" rolls have had the crust grated off with a rasp; the crumb is then sliced, buttered and browned in the oven, which is what the parenthesis explains. Either garnish is decorative and can be omitted.
- ShallotThe recipe calls for one shallot, finely chopped, but says nothing of its size. A small one is right for two soles; more than that and it competes with the oyster liquor.
- SmeltsThe postscript assumes whole small smelts, floured and deep fried, laid around the dish. They are still sold frozen in some markets; whitebait or small sand eels serve the same purpose.
- Fish and yieldTwo medium soles give eight fillets and serve four as a course. Dover sole is expensive; lemon sole, witch or flounder fillets behave the same way, though they are thinner and cook faster.
The title sits oddly on the page: a fish dish appears to have been headed after the French dinner roll used for its croutes, though how that happened cannot be established from the text alone. What the recipe describes is filets de sole a la Normande, one of the set pieces of nineteenth-century restaurant cookery, traditionally traced to Parisian kitchens of the 1830s and named for Normandy's shellfish and cream rather than for any peasant original. Its structure is characteristic of classic French practice: the fish is cooked in wine, the wine and the shellfish liquor go into the sauce, and the sauce goes back over the fish, so nothing is wasted and every element tastes of the same thing. Books of "high class cookery" were addressed to cooks expected to put restaurant dishes on a private table, and the smelts are offered only as a seasonal postscript.