Soles, to Choose
This fish should be both thick and firm. If the skin is difficult to be taken off, and the flesh looks grey, it is good.
Soles, Baked. INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons.-2 soles, 1/4 lb. of butter, egg and bread-crumbs, minced parsley, 1 glass of sherry, lemon-juice; cayenne and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 3d.
Clean, skin and well wash the fish, and dry them thoroughly in a cloth. Brush them over with egg, sprinkle with breadcrumbs mixed with a little minced parsley, lay them in a large flat baking-dish, white side uppermost; or if it will not hold the two soles, they may each be laid on a dish by itself; but they must not be put one on the top of the other. Melt the butter, and pour it over the whole, and bake for 20 minutes. Take a portion of the gravy that flows from the fish, add the wine, SOLES, TO CARVE. lemon-juice and seasoning, give it one boil, skim, pour it under the fish, and serve.
TIME.-20 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Two entries have been run together here: a note on judging soles at the fishmonger, and a baked sole with a sherry-butter gravy. The cooking method is sound; only the oven and the sherry need translating.
- The freshness test still worksSkin that clings and flesh with a faintly grey, translucent cast are signs of a fresh sole; the flesh whitens and the skin loosens as the fish ages. Add the modern checks — clear eyes, clean sea smell, firm springy flesh.
- No oven temperature is givenTake "bake" here as a moderate oven, 350-375F (180-190C). Higher and the butter browns and the crumb coating scorches before the thickest part of the fish is set.
- Butter and sherry in cupsA quarter pound of butter is 1/2 cup (115 g), which is generous but it is also the cooking medium and the base of the sauce. A Victorian wine glass is roughly 2 fl oz, so about 1/4 cup of sherry.
- Twenty minutes is for whole solesTwo whole Dover soles of about 12 oz each will be done in 15-20 minutes at 350F; fillets need 8-10. The fish is cooked when the flesh lifts cleanly from the backbone, around 145F at the thickest point.
- White side uppermost, and not stackedThis is the one instruction that matters. Overlapping the fish steams the underside, the crumbs go to paste, and the flesh cooks unevenly. Use two dishes rather than crowding one.
- The gravy gets one boil onlySpoon out some of the pan juices, add sherry, lemon, cayenne and salt, and bring it up just once before skimming. Prolonged boiling breaks the butter emulsion and cooks off the sherry's aroma.
- If you cannot get soleTrue Dover sole is expensive and often unavailable. Lemon sole, witch, dab or flounder all take this treatment; keep to flat fish of similar thickness so the timing holds.
- YieldTwo soles serving four or five is optimistic by modern portions. Reckon one 12 oz sole per person as a main course, or serve the original quantity to two or three.
- The cost note"2s. 3d." is two shillings and threepence, a pre-decimal price included for Victorian housekeepers costing their menus. It carries no useful meaning now beyond telling you sole was a middling-to-expensive fish.
Sole was the aristocrat of the Victorian fish counter, firm in the pan, and available year round, which is why the entry is marked "seasonable at any time" when so many others in the book are tied to a month. The trawlers working out of Brixham, Lowestoft and Grimsby, and the railways that carried their catch inland overnight, are what put fresh flat fish on middle-class tables away from the coast at all. The dish itself is barely a recipe so much as a technique of its era: egg and crumb the fish, flood it with butter, and build a quick sauce from the juices that flow out during baking, sharpened with sherry and lemon. Entries of this kind, packing a buying note, a recipe and a carving cross-reference into one dense block, are characteristic of the Beeton household books, though whether this particular page comes from the original compilation or from one of the many expanded and rearranged editions issued under her name after Isabella Beeton's death in 1865 cannot be told from the text alone.