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Baked Sole with Wine Sauce
Clean, trim off the gills and dark skin, and scrape the white side of a large sole; make a deep cut on each side of the backbone, and cut off the fins. Butter well the inside of a grating pan and put in the sole; season with a little pepper and salt, and pour in one pint of French white wine, and bake in the oven for twenty minutes. Put about one ounce of butter into a saucepan with two tablespoonfuls of flour and stir over the fire until well mixed, then add one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of water and a little pepper and salt; stir the sauce over the fire until boiling. When cooked strain the liquor off the sole into the sauce, boil the whole together, and then move the pan to the side of the fire; put in one ounce of butter and one tablespoonful of chopped parsley, and stir it until the butter has melted. Put the sole on a hot dish, pour the sauce over it, and serve.
A straightforward whole-fish bake with a flour-thickened pan sauce, written for a cook who already knows how to handle a flatfish. Two things need translating: the vessel and the cup.
- "Grating pan"This is a gratin pan — a shallow, oven-going metal or earthenware dish — not a grating or grating rack. Anything shallow and just large enough to hold the fish flat will do; a wide dish means the wine spreads thin and evaporates rather than poaching.
- Oven heatNone is given. A whole sole under wine wants a fairly brisk oven, 400F, and twenty minutes suits a fish of about 1½ to 2 lb. The flesh should lift cleanly from the backbone at the cut you made.
- The breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is usually reckoned at somewhere between 8 and 10 fl oz, so one and a half of them is roughly 12 to 15 fl oz of water. This is deliberately loose thickening: the sauce is meant to be thinned further by the fishy wine liquor from the pan, so do not aim for a coating consistency at this stage.
- Reduce the liquorThe strained wine liquor plus roughly 12 to 15 fl oz of water and two tablespoonfuls of flour gives a very slack sauce by modern taste (and rather less than a full pint of wine will come back out of the pan). Boiling the combined sauce for several minutes to concentrate it before finishing helps; the recipe's "boil the whole together" is doing more work than it lets on.
- The finishing butterThe pan comes off the direct heat before the last ounce of butter goes in, and that instruction is the hinge. Butter whisked into a sauce below the boil emulsifies and gives gloss; boiled, it separates into an oily film.
- French white wineRead this as a dry, unoaked white — Muscadet, Aligoté, Picpoul. A sweet or heavily oaked wine will dominate a fish this delicate, and a full pint of it is a lot of acid to carry.
- Buying the fishAsk the fishmonger to trim the fins and strip the dark skin; the white skin stays on and is only scraped. True Dover sole is expensive — lemon sole, witch or a large plaice all take the same treatment.
- YieldOne large sole serves two generously, or one as a main course. Halve the sauce quantities if you are cooking a single small fish.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms rather than its stoves, and the fish chapter of his 1896 book reflects the French repertoire that a New York luxury hotel of the 1890s was expected to produce — sole baked in white wine, its cooking liquor swept into a roux-based sauce, gestures toward the classical sole au vin blanc, though the restaurant version of the period was built on a reduced fish fumet with an egg-yolk liaison rather than a water-based roux. The wording, though, is English rather than French: "grating pan" and "breakfast cupful" are the vocabulary of Victorian domestic cookery books, and much of Oscar's text reads as if adapted from such sources for American households. Sole itself was a marker of expense on this side of the Atlantic.