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One Sole
Ingredients.
Half a pint of White Sauce.
Two tablespoonfuls of Tarragon Vinegar.
One teaspoonful of mixed Parsley, Tarragon, and Chervil chopped finely.
Put the fish on a greased tin and bake in a slow oven for about ten minutes or until done. Reduce the vinegar in a stewpan, add the white sauce and mix well, then the chopped herbs, and seasoning to taste. Place the fish when done on a dish, pour the sauce over it. (The white sauce should be made of fish-stock.) Sole au Gratin à l'Anglaise (No. 1).
Ingredients.
A plain baked sole finished with a herbed velouté, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen where the white sauce was already standing on the stove. The trailing line at the end is the printer running on into the next recipe, not part of this one.
- The sauce is the dishEverything depends on the white sauce being made with fish stock rather than milk alone — that is, a velouté built on a roux and the reduced bones and trimmings of the sole. Made with plain milk it tastes of nothing and the tarragon vinegar has nothing to bite against.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. That is generous for a single sole; enough to nap two portions.
- "A slow oven"By the usual Victorian reckoning somewhere around 300F, though the book gives no temperature. For a whole sole on a greased tin, ten minutes at that heat suits a small fish only; a thicker Dover sole of a pound or more will want closer to fifteen, and is done when the flesh lifts cleanly from the backbone at the thickest point.
- Reducing the vinegarTwo tablespoons of tarragon vinegar boiled down to a spoonful or less concentrates the tarragon and burns off the raw acetic edge. Do it in a non-reactive pan, and reduce before the sauce goes in — adding vinegar to a finished velouté gives a thin, sour result.
- Parsley, tarragon, chervilThis is fines herbes minus the chives. Chervil has largely vanished from shops; if you cannot find it, weight the mix toward tarragon and parsley rather than substituting dill, which pulls the sauce somewhere else entirely. Add the herbs off the heat so they keep their colour.
- Preparing the fishThe recipe says nothing about preparation, so the sole was presumably bought ready skinned on the dark side and trimmed of its fringe of fins. Ask for the same, and keep the bones for the stock the sauce depends on.
- SeasoningNo quantity is given; the recipe says only "seasoning to taste". Season the sauce rather than the fish, and taste before salting, since a reduced fish stock may already be salty.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield; half a pint of sauce suggests one sole serving one as a main course, or two as a fish course in a longer meal.
Volumes titled High-Class Cookery Recipes belong to the late-Victorian school-of-cookery trade, when training colleges published their teaching material as books for the mistress and, more often, for the cook she employed. The compression here is characteristic: a recipe that begins with a finished half-pint of white sauce is written for someone in a kitchen where sauce is a standing item, not something you start from scratch. The dish itself is a domesticated version of French practice — tarragon vinegar reduced into a velouté, and English cookery of the period absorbed it wholesale, along with the habit of printing dish names half in French. Sole was the prestige flatfish of the period, expensive and much prized.