Soles, Fried
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons.-2 middling-sized soles, hot lard or clarified dripning, egg and bread-crumbs. AVERAGE COS, 3s.
Skin and carefully wash te soles, and cut off the fins, wipe them very dry, and let them remain in the cloth until it is time to dress them. Have ready some fine bread-crumbs and beaten egg; dredge the soles with a little flour, brush them over with egg, and cover with bread-crumbs.
Put them in a deep pan, with plenty of clarified dripping or lard (when the expense is not objected to, oil is still better), heated SOLES, FRIED. so that it may neither scorch the fish nor make them sodden. When they are sufficiently cooked on one side, turn them carefully and brown them on the other; they may be considered ready when a thick smoke rises. Lift them out carefully, and lay them before the fire on a reversed sieve and soft paper, to absorb the fat. Particular attention should be paid to this, as nothing is more disagreeable than greasy fish; this may be always avoided by dressing them in good time, and allowing a few minutes for them to get thoroughly crisp and free from greasy moisture. Dish them on a hot napkin, garnish with cut lemon and fried parsley, and send them to table with shrimp sauce and plain melted butter.
TIME.-10 minutes for large soles, less time for small ones.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A straightforward shallow-fry of whole flatfish, with one instruction that modern cooks should ignore outright.
- Ignore the smoke cue"ready when a thick smoke rises" means the fat has passed its smoke point, which for dripping or lard is somewhere around 370-400F. Judge by colour and time instead: the crumb should be deep gold, and the recipe's own 10 minutes for a large sole, turned once, in fat held at 350-360F, is the better guide.
- The fishBeeton most likely means Dover sole, and "middling-sized" is not defined; two fish are meant to serve four or five at table. Lemon sole, dab, plaice or witch all fry the same way; true Dover sole is now expensive enough that flour-egg-crumb is arguably a waste of it.
- SkinningThe dark upper skin is pulled off in one piece: nick it across the tail, lift a flap, grip with a cloth and strip toward the head. The white underside skin can stay. Fishmongers will do this on request.
- Clarified drippingBeef dripping with the water and meat solids settled out. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the job the recipe itself recommends as best; use plenty of fat in a deep pan, as the recipe directs.
- Dry, then dredgeKeeping the fish wrapped in a cloth until the moment of cooking helps the coating adhere. Flour, egg, crumbs, then into the fat.
- DrainingA "reversed sieve" before the fire is the equivalent of a wire rack in a low oven. Paper directly under hot fried fish can trap steam and soften the crust; better to rack the fish and let the paper catch drips below.
- To serveThe "hot napkin" is a folded linen cloth on the platter, now generally skipped. Shrimp sauce is a butter sauce with peeled brown shrimps stirred through; "plain melted butter" in Victorian usage is a flour-thickened butter sauce rather than butter simply melted.
- Fried parsleyDry sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop hissing, then drained. Wet parsley will spit violently.
Fried sole was the standard fish course of the Victorian middle-class dinner, and Beeton's note that it is "seasonable at any time" is part of the point: unlike salmon or mackerel, sole came to market year round, and the railways carried Dover sole up from the Channel ports to inland towns in good enough condition to fry. The average cost of 3s. for two fish was a serious outlay, which explains the careful aside that oil is better "when the expense is not objected to" he Sunday joint's dripping was the cheaper option, while olive oil was an imported grocery. The insistence on draining the fish thoroughly is the theme of the whole entry, and it reflects a real anxiety of the period: fat was reused from batch to batch, with no thermometer to judge it by.