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One Shalot (Half a teaspoonful of Parsley)
Half a teaspoonful of Parsley.
Half a teaspoonful of Anchovy.
Skin the sole, make an incision sufficiently large to admit of the stuffing; put the butter on a plate, add the shalot, parsley (chopped very fine), and anchovy sauce; put this stuffing in the sole, and put it on a buttered gratin dish. Then take- One ounce of Butter.
This page has come apart in the printing: the ingredient list has been split across entries, so the title carries one line of it and the method runs straight into the beginning of the next. What survives is enough to cook from, but you are reconstructing rather than following.
- What the full list appears to beOne sole, one shallot, half a teaspoonful each of chopped parsley and anchovy (essence or sauce), and butter for the stuffing in a quantity lost at the break, with one ounce of butter called for where the page breaks off. The stuffing is a compound butter, nothing more.
- ShalotThe older spelling of shallot. One bulb, chopped as finely as the parsley, or the stuffing will be coarse and raw-tasting inside a fish that cooks in minutes.
- AnchovyVictorian kitchens meant bottled anchovy sauce or essence, a thin salty condiment, not the paste sold in tubes today. Anchovy paste works if you use a scant half-teaspoon, as it is more concentrated and considerably saltier.
- Making the pocketThe recipe asks only for the sole to be skinned and an incision made large enough to take the stuffing. One workable reading is to run a knife along the backbone from the head end and work it outward over the ribs to lift a flap, giving a cavity rather than a slit; the text does not say which side is skinned or how the cut is made.
- Butter on a plateThe butter is worked soft with the back of a knife or a fork on a cold plate and the flavourings mashed into it. It should stay a paste, not melt, so that it holds in the pocket and bastes the fish as it cooks.
- Gratin dish and ovenA shallow buttered dish is all the recipe specifies; no oven, temperature or time is given. A moderately hot oven for something over ten minutes suits a sole of about a pound, and the flesh should part cleanly from the bone at the thickest point.
- The second ounce of butterThe page breaks off at a line reading "One ounce of Butter", which may begin a further stage of this dish or the next entry entirely. If it belongs here, dotting it over the fish or pouring it over as a browned butter would both be consistent with the method as far as it goes.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. One sole would serve one as a main course, or two as a fish course in a longer menu.
Sole cooked in a gratin dish with a stuffing of shallot, parsley and anchovy belongs to the Anglo-French repertoire that dominated British high-class cookery in the late nineteenth century, when professional kitchens worked in French technique and English ingredients. Anchovy essence is the English signature here: bottled anchovy was a staple of the Victorian storeroom, valued for the savoury depth it gave fish and meat sauces long before anyone spoke of umami, and it turns up in everything from Worcestershire-style condiments to the butter served on a grilled steak. Dover sole was the most prestigious flatfish on the English coast, its firm flesh well suited to a dish of this kind.