Home › Fish › Sole, Stewed Family Style
Sole, Stewed Family Style
Take a large sole. Cut in pieces to suit. Take a pot; add a little oil or butter. Chop up one onion and brown a little in pot. Put in sole and cook until warm. Add a little white wine and a little tomato and parsley chopped up, also boiled potatoes cut in pieces to suit.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Add a little water; cook ten minutes and serve. Slow fire.
BROILED HERRING with
A loose Italian-American fish stew written in the shorthand of a cook who expected you to taste as you went. The quantities are all "a little," so the real work is judging the liquid.
- The hingeSole is thin and delicate; ten minutes of simmering is close to the outer limit and only works because the fire is slow. Slide the fillets in whole where possible, spoon liquid over them rather than stirring, and stop as soon as the flesh turns opaque.
- What "a large sole" meansA whole Dover sole of a pound or more, or about 1 to 1 1/4 lb of sole fillets. Fillets are what you will find at a market; flounder, fluke or plaice behave the same way.
- "A little tomato"This could mean tomato paste or conserva from a tin, or simply chopped fresh tomato; the recipe does not say. Roughly a tablespoon of paste, thinned in the wine, gives a light coral broth. A couple of chopped fresh tomatoes also works but makes a wetter, brighter stew.
- Liquid quantitiesFigure about 1/2 cup dry white wine and 1/2 cup water for a pound of fish, enough to come partway up the pieces. This is a shallow braise, not a soup.
- Slow fireA bare simmer on low heat, lid ajar. Anything approaching a boil will shred the sole and cloud the broth.
- Cook until warmThe instruction to "cook until warm" before adding liquid means only a brief turn in the fat to set the surface, perhaps a minute per side. Do not brown the fish.
- The potatoesThey go in already boiled, so they are there to soak up broth and thicken it slightly. Use waxy potatoes cut in 1-inch pieces; floury ones will collapse in the ten minutes.
- YieldServes two generously, or three with bread. It does not reheat well; the fish falls apart.
The Bride's Cook Book belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century American manuals aimed at young women setting up house, and this entry suggests how little smoothing immigrant home cooking sometimes received in those books: the phrasing ("cut in pieces to suit," "slow fire") reads like dictation from a cook who worked by eye. Stewing flatfish with onion, white wine, tomato and parsley is a pattern found up and down the Italian and southern French coasts, where the broth mattered more than the garnish. The addition of already-boiled potatoes is a thrift habit rather than a regional signature; leftover potatoes turned a small piece of fish into a meal for two. The stray line at the end, "BROILED HERRING with," is most likely the catchword or running head of the next recipe rather than part of this one.