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Salt, Pepper, and Nutmeg (Skin trim and wipe two)
Skin, trim and wipe two medium-sized soles place them in a buttered sauté-pan, season with salt and pepper, pour over them the mushroom juice, cover with a buttered paper and cook in the oven until done. This will take from fifteen to twenty minutes, according to the heat of the oven.
In the meantime put the milk on to boil, melt the butter in a stewpan, add the flour, and stir over the fire until the flour becomes of a fawn colour. Now add the boiling milk and a little boiling water. Stir over the fire, and let it simmer for about ten minutes, adding a little more water, or fish stock if you have any, if the sauce should appear too thick. Stir in the cheese.
Season with salt, pepper, and a little grated nutmeg.
The soles being cooked by this time, place them on an oblong flat dish. Add the liquor which remains in the sauté-pan to the sauce. Strain it and pour it over the fish. Sprinkle with the rest of the grated Parmesan. Place the dish in the oven, or under a hot salamander just long enough for the top to take colour, and serve in the same dish.
A whole-sole gratin in the Anglo-French country-house style: the fish baked under paper in mushroom liquor, napped with a cheese sauce and glazed. The printed page carries no ingredient list, so the quantities have to be judged.
- Missing quantitiesThe recipe as reproduced begins mid-method, with the milk, butter, flour, cheese and mushroom juice never specified. For a sauce to coat two soles, a working proportion is 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and about half a pint of milk, with 2-3 oz grated Parmesan (the recipe implies the cheese is split between the sauce and the topping); the mushroom juice is a few tablespoons. Treat these as reconstruction, not as the author's figures.
- Mushroom juiceThis means the strained liquor from cooking or stewing mushrooms, a by-product in any kitchen making mushroom preparations. The liquid from a pan of sliced mushrooms sweated in butter, or the soaking water from dried mushrooms strained of grit, gives the same effect.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the text only says 'according to the heat of the oven'. As a modern working figure, around 350F suits fish under paper; the stated fifteen to twenty minutes assumes whole soles on the bone.
- The buttered paperA cartouche of parchment cut to the pan, buttered side down on the fish. It keeps the surface from drying without steaming the fish as a lid would, and it is worth doing rather than reaching for foil.
- Cooking timeTwo medium soles on the bone will be done in 10-15 minutes at 350F; the upper end of the original range risks a dry, fibrous fish. The flesh should lift cleanly from the backbone at the thickest point, around 140-145F.
- Fawn-coloured rouxThis is a blond roux, cooked past the raw-flour stage but well short of brown, three to four minutes over moderate heat. It is the difference between a sauce that tastes of paste and one that does not.
- Cheese and reheatingStir the Parmesan in off the boil. Cheese sauces held over direct heat after the cheese goes in will string and separate.
- SalamanderA standing overhead grill in the professional kitchen of the period. A domestic broiler on its highest setting, with the dish close to the element for two or three minutes, does the same job; watch it, as Parmesan colours fast.
- YieldTwo medium soles serve two generously as a main course, or four as a fish course in a longer menu.
The dish is a sole Mornay in all but name: a béchamel enriched with Parmesan, of the kind Anglo-French kitchens of the late nineteenth century served over poached and baked fish, and which the restaurant repertoire later codified. Sole, and Dover sole in particular, stood high in the fish hierarchy of British high-class cookery, its firm flesh holding together whole through baking and glazing. Several details point to a well-equipped kitchen rather than a plain domestic one: mushroom liquor to hand, fish stock assumed but conceded as optional, a salamander for the final colouring, and the instruction to serve in the same dish, which is the point of gratin service.