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Pepper and Salt (One ounce of Butter) (II)
One ounce of Butter.
Half a gill of White Wine.
Fillet the soles; trim the fillets neatly. Chop the shrimps finely; put them in a saucepan on the fire with half an ounce of butter. When warm add the anchovy paste and parsley; moisten with a few drops of Béchamel sauce; put on a plate and let it cool. Spread one side of the fillets with this mixture; roll up; shape them well, and tie up with some cotton, place them in a buttered sauté-pan, sprinkle over with a few drops of lemon juice and the wine; season with pepper and salt; cover with a buttered paper, and cook slowly in the oven for about fifteen minutes. Set them on a baking-sheet, and let them get quite cold.
Put the Béchamel sauce, with about a gill of aspic, in the sauté-pan, containing the fish liquor; stir over the fire, let it reduce a little, and strain it through a tammy. Now trim the fillets neatly, and cut them in two, crossways.
Mask the moulds with a coating of aspic jelly ; ornament the bottoms with small dice of truffles to represent the nails, etc. Cover with a layer of the prepared chaudfroid sauce; when nearly set put half a fillet in each mould. Cover well with chaudfroid sauce, set this again, and fill up with D2 more sauce, finishing with a thin coating of aspic.
Put them on the ice till set. Turn out and place them on a dish in border shape; put a little salad in the centre, and garnish with fancifully cut pieces of aspic and parsley.
This is a chaud-froid of sole — poached stuffed fillets set in sauced moulds and turned out cold. The title is an artefact of the book's layout: the page carries only the tail of an ingredient list, so quantities for the shrimps, anchovy paste, parsley, Béchamel, aspic and truffles are left to the cook's judgement.
- The hinge: everything must be coldThe fillets are cooled completely before saucing, and each layer of chaudfroid has to set before the next goes on. Sauce applied to warm fish slides off and refuses to set; work in stages with the moulds on ice or in the refrigerator between coats.
- GillsA gill is a quarter of a pint. In British usage that is about 5 imperial fl oz (roughly 140 ml), so half a gill of white wine is about 2 1/2 fl oz (70 ml) and a gill of aspic about 5 fl oz (140 ml).
- "Cook slowly in the oven"The book gives no temperature; for a covered sauté-pan of thin fillets a low oven, somewhere around 300-325F, is a reasonable modern reading. Fifteen minutes is generous for rolled sole; check at ten, as overcooked fillets weep liquid into the sauce later.
- Buttered paperA cartouche — a disc of parchment cut to the pan, buttered side down on the fish. It keeps the surface moist without browning. Foil will do the same job but is less kind to the fish.
- CottonFine cotton string, not sewing thread. Modern kitchen twine is the direct equivalent, and the paupiettes should be untied before they are trimmed and halved.
- TammyA tammy is a close-woven worsted cloth through which sauce was wrung to a gloss. A chinois lined with muslin gives the same clarity with less effort.
- Chaudfroid sauceBéchamel enriched with the reduced fish liquor and set with aspic. The recipe gives about a gill of aspic but no quantity of Béchamel, so the proportion is left to the cook; the sauce wants cooling to the point where it coats a spoon thickly but still flows. Too warm and it runs; too cool and it sets in ridges.
- MouldsSmall dariole or timbale moulds, one half-fillet each. The recipe does not say how many soles to use, so the number of moulds depends on how many fillets are cut.
- Aspic and holdingAspic was the period's answer to keeping cooked fish presentable on a buffet; it is not a preservative. Keep the finished moulds refrigerated below 40F and serve the same day.
Chaud-froid — literally "hot-cold", food cooked hot and served cold under a set sauce — belongs to the grand repertoire of late nineteenth-century professional cookery, where cold buffet work was where a chef showed his hand. The name is traditionally traced to an eighteenth-century French household in which a fricassee was served cold after its diners were called away, though the story is anecdote rather than record. What is documented is the technique's central place in the Carême-to-Escoffier line of French service: a velouté or Béchamel bound with aspic, applied in patient layers, then decorated with truffle cut into shapes. The instruction here to lay truffle dice "to represent the nails" points to a set decorative vocabulary that kitchen apprentices may well have been expected to reproduce, though how general that expectation was is hard to document. Books titled for "high class cookery" were aimed at cooks in large private houses in Britain, teaching them the French methods their employers had eaten in hotels and restaurants.