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Soles, with Mushrooms
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons. -1 pint of milk, 1 pint of water, 1 oz. of butter, 1 oz. of salt, a little lemon-juice, 2 middlingsized soles. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 3d. Cleanse the soles, but do not skin them, and lay them in a fish-kettle with the milk, water, butter, salt and lemon-juice. Bring them gradually to boil, and let them simmer very gently till done, which will be in about 7 minutes. Take them up, drain them well on a cloth, put them on a hot dish, and pour over them a good mushroom sauce. (See Sauces.) TIME. After the water boils, 7 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain milk-and-water poach whose whole point is the sauce; the fish is cooked to be a neutral, white-fleshed base. Two things matter: keep the liquid below a boil, and have the mushroom sauce finished before the soles go in.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: bring it up slowly, then keep it gentle -- "Bring them gradually to boil, and let them simmer very gently" means take the liquid up to the boil and immediately drop it to a bare tremble. A rolling boil will shred the delicate flesh of sole.
- Fish kettleA long, lidded pan with a perforated lifting plate, sized to hold whole flatfish flat. A deep roasting tin over two burners, or a wide sauté pan, will do; the fish must lie flat and be just covered by the liquid, so scale the milk and water up or down to suit the pan rather than sticking to a pint of each.
- The saltAn ounce is about 28 g in roughly 1.1 litres of liquid, about 2.5 per cent: a strongly salted poaching bath rather than an error. Use half if the mushroom sauce is already well salted.
- "Middling-sized" solesBeeton gives no weight; two whole soles on the bone are meant to serve four or five. Ask the fishmonger to gut and trim the frill. Beeton says only "do not skin them", and gives no reason; the skin does help hold the fish together in the liquid and lifts off easily at table.
- TimingSeven minutes from the boil, as Beeton specifies; check by lifting the flesh at the thick end near the head, where it should part cleanly from the backbone. Skinless fillets of lemon sole, plaice or flounder need 2 to 3 minutes and are better slid off the heat to finish in the residual warmth.
- DrainingDrain well on a cloth is not fussiness — poaching liquid pooling under the fish will thin the sauce on the plate into a milky puddle. A clean tea towel or kitchen paper, thirty seconds, then straight onto a warmed dish.
- The mushroom sauceBeeton gives more than one mushroom sauce, white and brown; the white one, built on butter, flour and cream or milk with button mushrooms, is the natural match here. Make it first and hold it warm; some of the strained poaching liquid can be used in place of part of the liquid, though it is very salty, so taste before seasoning.
- The cost note2s. 3d. is Beeton's "average cost" for the dish as served, of no use as a modern conversion.
Poaching in milk and water is often said to be among the older English treatments for flatfish, and it survives in the household books precisely because it does nothing: it cooks the fish without browning, colouring or drying it, leaving the cook free to spend her effort on the sauce. That division of labour runs right through Mrs Beeton — the fish chapters are full of plainly boiled soles, turbot and cod, each sent out with a different sauce from the long sauce chapter, so that one technique yields a dozen dishes. Sole itself, and Dover sole in particular, was the fish of choice for this kind of cooking, and the recipe is described as "seasonable at any time". The mushroom sauce points to the second half of the year, when field and cultivated mushrooms were cheap, though bottled mushroom ketchup and preserved buttons stood in the rest of the year.