Soles, Fricasseed
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-2 middling-sized soles, 1 small one, 1/2 teaspoonful of chopped lemon-peel, 1 teaspoonful of chopped parsley, a little grated bread: salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste; 1 egg, 2 oz. of butter, 1/2 pint of good gravy, 2 tablespoonfuls of port wine, cayenne and lemon-juice to taste.
AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d.
Fry the soles of a nice brown, and drain them well from fat. Take all the meat from the small sole, chop it fine, and mix with it the lemon-peel, parsley, bread and seasoning; work all together with the yolk of an egg and the butter; make this into small balls, and fry them. Thicken the gravy with a dessertspoonful of flour, add the port wine, cayenne and lemon-juice; lay in the 2 soles and balls; let them simmer gently for 5 minutes; serve hot, and garnish with cut lemon.
TIME.-10 minutes to fry the soles.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A Victorian brown fricassee: whole fried soles finished in a meat gravy sharpened with port, with forcemeat balls made from a third fish. The hinge is that the soles are fully cooked before they meet the sauce, so the final simmer is a warming and glazing step only.
- The five-minute simmer is not cooking timeThe soles are already cooked through from frying; the sauce is there to coat and flavour them. Push past five minutes and the fillets break up and go woolly.
- "Middling-sized soles"The book gives no weights. Read it as two whole soles of a size to serve two or three each, plus a smaller one to be boned out for the forcemeat. Lemon sole, witch or plaice will stand in; adjust frying time to thickness.
- Half a pint of gravyAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. "Good gravy" here means a proper brown meat stock or reduced beef gravy, not the fish stock a fish sauce would be built on today.
- Grated breadFresh white breadcrumbs, grated from a stale crumb rather than dried and toasted. Two to three tablespoons is enough to bind the chopped fish without making the balls stodgy.
- Butter and egg in the forcemeat2 oz is 4 tablespoons, softened not melted, worked in with one egg yolk. The mixture should just hold a shape; if it slumps, chill it for twenty minutes before rolling and frying.
- ThickeningA dessertspoonful is about two teaspoons of flour. Slake it in a little cold gravy or work it into butter as beurre manié before whisking in, or it will lump in the hot pan.
- Port and cayenneTwo tablespoons of port in 10 fl oz of gravy is assertive; add it, then let the sauce bubble a minute to lose the raw spirit before the lemon juice and cayenne go in. Season the sauce last, after the port has concentrated.
- YieldTwo soles for six is optimistic by modern portioning. Treat it as a first course for six, or serve four with a third whole sole added.
A fricassee in the classical sense is meat cut up, cooked gently and served in a sauce, most often a pale one thickened with egg and cream — which is what makes this brown, port-laced version, with the fish left whole rather than jointed, a distinctly English reading of the term. Victorian kitchens applied meat gravy to fish far more readily than we do; the same larder of brown stock, port, cayenne and lemon that dressed a hare or a hash was turned on sole without a second thought. Sole itself was the prestige flatfish of the London market, expensive enough that the recipe's costing of 3s. 6d. might suggest a household of some means. The small third sole, broken down into forcemeat balls, may reflect the book's habitual economy.