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Filleted Soles au Fromage
Boil the filleted soles in water. Make a sauce with butter. One spoonful of flour--milk, pepper and salt, powdered cheese (Cheddar). Boil it, adding some washed and chopped mushrooms and a little cream. Put the filets on a dish and pour them over the sauce. Leave it about a quarter of an hour in the oven, so that it becomes slightly browned.
Filleted Fish, with White Sauce and Tomatoes Brown two onions in butter, and add a spray of parsley, half a pound of tomatoes and a claret glassful of white wine. Let this simmer for half an hour, and then pass it through the tammy. Then fry half a pound of mushrooms, and add them and their liquor to the sauce, thickening it, if necessary, with a little cornflour. A great improvement is a little liebig. Place your fish in the oven, and cook it gently in butter, with pepper and salt. When it is done, serve it with the sauce poured over it.
The Miller's Cod (Cabillaud meunier) Cut your cod in slices, and roll them in flour. Put them to fry in a good piece of butter, adding chopped parsley, pepper and salt, and the juice of one lemon. This is very good, if served in the dish that it is cooked in. Dutch Herrings (A cold dish) Take some Dutch, or some salted herrings, and remove the skin, backbones, etc. Lay the fish in milk for at least twenty-four hours to get the salt out. Make a mayonnaise sauce, adding to it the roe from the herrings, in small pieces; wipe and drain the fish, and pour over them the sauce.
Four short fish recipes run together on one page, in the telegraphic style of a cook dictating from memory. The quantities are loose throughout and the sauces are written as though the reader already knows how a béchamel behaves.
- Do not boil the soleSole fillets are thin and set in two to three minutes. Bring salted water barely to a tremble, slide the fillets in off the heat, and lift them out as soon as they turn opaque; a rolling boil shreds them and leaves the flesh cottony under the sauce.
- The cheese sauce, in modern termsRoughly 1 oz butter, 1 tablespoon flour, and about a cup of milk gives the right consistency, with 2-3 oz grated Cheddar stirred in off the heat. "Powdered cheese" means finely grated, not a packet product. Add the cheese after the flour has cooked out, or it will string.
- Browning in the ovenThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'in the oven'. A hot oven will glaze the top, but the fish is already cooked and fifteen minutes will dry it. Five minutes under a hot broiler does the same job.
- TammyA tammy or tammy cloth is a fine woven strainer. A conical sieve or a food mill does the same work for the tomato and onion base; a blender then a sieve is quicker.
- Claret glassfulSomewhere in the region of 2 to 4 fl oz of wine. There was no standard measure and period glasses varied, so treat this as approximate rather than exact.
- LiebigLiebig's Extract of Meat, the dark beef concentrate sold in a stoneware jar from the 1860s onward. A teaspoon of beef bouillon paste or a crumbled half-cube gives the same salty, savoury lift. Cornflour is cornstarch.
- Cabillaud meunierMeunière means the fish is floured and fried in butter, so the pan must be hot enough to set the crust before the butter darkens. Add the lemon juice off the heat at the end rather than into the frying butter.
- The salt herringsTwenty-four hours in milk belongs in the refrigerator, not on a counter, and the milk should be changed once. Since the fish is never cooked and is dressed in raw-egg mayonnaise, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise as the base, and eat it the day it is made.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain during the First World War from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees, and its fish chapter reflects a country whose kitchen looked to the North Sea: Ostend was the great sole port, and filleted sole under a cream or cheese sauce was a staple of the Belgian coast and of Brussels restaurants alike. The specification of Cheddar, in brackets, is the giveaway that these recipes were written down for English cooks and English shops rather than transcribed unchanged; a Belgian cook at home would more likely have reached for a Gruyère-type cheese. The Liebig extract in the second recipe was an ordinary kitchen shortcut of the period, and the salted Dutch herring in the last is the oldest thing here, a barrelled trade good that had moved through the Low Countries for centuries before anyone thought to dress it with mayonnaise.