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Salt and Pepper (One teaspoonful of chopped)
ム One teaspoonful of chopped Parsley.
Half a gill of Cream.
Put the bones and fins of the sole into a saucepan with half a pint of water and milk, and put it on to boil. Fold the fillets loosely, put them on a greased tin, sprinkle with pepper and salt, and squeeze some lemon-juice over them. Cover with a buttered paper, and place in a moderate oven for about six minutes. Melt the butter in a stewpan, add the flour, mix well. Strain and pour in the fish-stock made from the bones, and boil for ten minutes. Then add salt, pepper, cream, lemon-juice, and the chopped parsley.
Arrange the fillets in a circle on a dish, and pour the sauce over them.
An ingredient list truncated by the printer, but the method is complete: fillets of sole baked under paper, sauced with a fish velouté finished with cream, lemon and parsley. The quantities of butter and flour are missing, so work from the volume of stock.
- The missing rouxThe half pint of water and milk yields a little under half a pint of strained stock once it has boiled. For a sauce of pouring consistency, allow about 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour to that half pint.
- Half a gill of creamA British gill is a quarter pint, so half a gill is 2 1/2 fl oz, a scant third of a cup. In American books a gill is half a cup, which would make it a bare quarter cup. Either reading works here; the cream is for enrichment, not bulk.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. Six minutes is right for folded sole fillets and they will be opaque and just set; sole is thin and goes cottony fast, so check at five.
- Buttered paperA cartouche of parchment cut to the size of the tin, buttered side down on the fish. It traps steam and stops the surface drying. Foil will do but does not sit as closely.
- The stock is the pointSole bones and fins give a clean, gelatinous fumet in about 20 minutes; longer than that and fish bones turn bitter and glue-like. Get it on to boil before you touch the fillets, then strain it well through muslin.
- Boiling the sauce ten minutesNot an error. A flour-thickened sauce needs that long at a gentle boil to cook out the raw starch taste; stir often, and thin with a little more stock if it tightens too far.
- Order at the finishCream, lemon juice and parsley go in off the boil. Lemon juice added to a hot cream sauce over direct heat can make it look grainy, and parsley loses its colour if it simmers.
- YieldTwo Dover soles give eight small fillets, which is a first course for four or a light main for two. Arrange them overlapping in a ring and sauce them just before serving so they do not sit and cool.
This belongs to the Anglo-French repertoire that dominated late-Victorian and Edwardian professional kitchens, where filets de sole in one guise or another was a standard fish course at a formal dinner. The technique is typical of Escoffier-era practice: bones and trimmings into the pot first for a fumet, the fumet into a butter-and-flour roux to make a velouté, the velouté finished with cream and acid at the last moment. Dover sole was the prestige flatfish of the British table, firm enough to fillet, fold and hold its shape under a sauce, and improved rail transport and ice widened its London market. The instruction to arrange the fillets "in a circle on a dish" belongs to the era of service à la russe, when courses came to table in sequence and appearance carried considerable weight. The garbled title and the stray teaspoonful of parsley look like artifacts of the printing rather than the author's intention.