Colbert's Sole
The great French minister who organised the financial system under which, to a very large extent, France still exists, would seem to have a surer title to fame in the soup and the fish which he admired than in all his toils of office. So it has been from time immemorial, to the frustration of human effort. A man's greatest works, in which he took pride, perish, and he lives by some trifle of which he thought nothing; for the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. What is great indeed and what is little we know not; and time makes wonderful havoc in our estimate of magnitudes. The sole of Colbert is now of a surety more to mankind than all his statesmanship.
It is a fried sole, which after being cooked is boned and then filled with maître d'hôtel butter and with lemonjuice. Trim the sole well, removing the head, a good part of the tail, and the black skin. On the side from which the skin has been removed make a slit down the backbone; slide the knife in so as to sever as much as possible the flesh from the ribs, and with the handle of the knife break the backbone in several places, so as to render it easy of removal after the fish is cooked. The sole is then to be fried in the ordinary way; when fried and drained the bones will come away without trouble; the inside of the fish is to be filled with maître d'hôtel butter into which lemon-juice has been worked; and it is to be sent to table with slices of lemon and fried parsley. The sole of Colbert typified his taxes. He ate his fish without bones, and the Government devoured his taxes without a thought of the groans which had been wrung out of them.
The method is sound and still standard in French kitchens; what the text leaves unsaid is the coating, the fat temperature and the composition of the butter. Those are the three things to settle before you start.
- The hinge: break the backbone before fryingSlitting along the spine and cracking the bone in several places with the knife handle is what lets you lift the skeleton out cleanly once the fish is cooked and set. Skip it and the fillets tear when you try to pull the bone through hot, fragile flesh.
- "Fried in the ordinary way"In a book of this date this most likely means flour, beaten egg, then fine dry breadcrumbs, and deep fat rather than a shallow pan, though the text specifies none of it. In a modern kitchen, fry at 350-375F for about 4-5 minutes for a 12 oz sole, until the crumb is deep gold and the flesh at the spine is opaque.
- Maitre d'hotel butterNot a purchased product: soften 4 oz butter and work in a good handful of chopped parsley, the juice of half a lemon, salt and pepper. Chill it firm, then push it into the cavity in pieces the moment the bones come out so it melts into the fish rather than pooling on the plate.
- The fish itselfTrue Dover sole is the intended fish and is expensive; lemon sole, witch or a pair of large plaice fillets handle the same way. Flatfish sold as "sole" in North America is usually flounder, which is thinner and will cook more quickly.
- SkinningRemove only the dark upper skin, as directed. The white underside skin holds the fish together in the fryer and is worth leaving on.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs thoroughly and give them 15-20 seconds in the same fat, no more. Wet parsley spits violently and parsley left in past a half-minute turns bitter and black.
- YieldOne sole per person, served at once. The butter is the sauce, so the fish cannot be held warm without the filling running out.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), Louis XIV's controller-general of finances, has his name on this dish and on a compound butter and a brown sauce besides, though as with most dishes named for a statesman the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the recipe as written here belongs to nineteenth-century restaurant cooking, not to the seventeenth. Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) is full of such moralising asides, and the sting in the tail here is deliberate: Colbert's name in France is bound up with taxation and with the tariff system later called Colbertism, so the boneless fish becomes a joke about revenue extracted without complaint. What the entry actually records is a technique — boning a whole fried flatfish through the back and filling the cavity with seasoned butter — and it is still cooked that way in classical French kitchens under the same name.