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Fillets of Soles with Oysters
Separate the fillets from the bones of some soles, trim them and fry them in a little butter. Fix a bread croustade on a hot dish, and fill it with oysters mixed with allemande sauce. When cooked arrange the fillets round the croustade, pour a little allemande sauce over and serve with a sauceboatful of the same.
Fillets of Soles with Ravigote Sauce Place some fillets of soles in a saucepan with a lump of butter, the juice of half a lemon and a little pepper and salt, cook over a slow fire, but do not brown them. Pour two and one-half teacupfuls of white sauce into a saucepan, with one and one-half teaceupfuls of white broth, and boil for three or four minutes, keeping it well stirred. Mix a little chopped chervil, parsley and tarragon with two ounces of fresh butter and stir it into the sauce, with two teaspoonfuls of tarragon vinegar, seasoning with salt and pepper and stirring it over the fire for a minute longer. Place the fillets on a hot dish, pour the sauce over and serve.
Soles, Marechal Skin, clean and marinade a pair of soles and fry them plain, having previously dipped them in egg and breadcrumbs. Let them get cold, trim them, brush over with warned butter mixed with beaten yolks of eggs and salt, cover them with fine breadcrumbs mixed with grated Parmesan cheese; pour a little more warmed butter over, lay them on an oiled gridiron, over a slow, clear fire, and broil for about twenty minutes, turning them over so as to color both sides equally. When done place them on a dish, pour round some more maitre d'hotel sauce and serve.
Sole, Normandy Style Lay a thick-skinned sole in the bottom of a stewpan, having previously buttered the latter, and put in with it about a dozen mussels that have been blanched in boiling water, eighteen or twenty oysters, a chopped onion, a bunch of thyme and parsley, some trimmings of truffles, and a few pieces of butter. Pour in one teacupful each of chablis and broth, season with salt and pepper, place the lid on the stewpan and let the contents simmer until nearly done. Put into a stewpan some trimmings of veal and bacon with some chopped vegetable, pour in one-half pint of broth, mix in a lump of butter that has been worked with a small quantity of flour and boil the sauce for twenty minutes. When three-fourths done put the sole in a dish that will stand the heat of an oven, mix its cooking liquor with the sauce and strain them both in a clean stewpan; then add the beaten yolks of two eggs and stir it by the side of the fire until done and thick. Pour the sauce over the sole, put the mussels, oysters and some sauted mushrooms on the top, and garnish round the sides with heart-shaped croutons of fried bread. Cover the dish with a sheet of buttered paper, and finish cooking the contents in the oven. When cooked serve the fish in the same dish placed on a large flat dish covered by a folded napkin.
Four sole preparations run together in one block, all built on the same nineteenth-century French repertoire of mother sauces and secondary garnishes. Read them as four separate dishes; each serves two from a pair of soles.
- The hinge: fillets cook in minutesSole fillets are done in two to four minutes total in butter, when they turn opaque and just begin to flake. The Marechal instruction to broil twenty minutes was written for a slow charcoal gridiron and cold, pre-fried fish being reheated to color the crumbs; under a modern broiler the same fish is dry in three or four minutes per side.
- OystersFold shucked oysters into the hot allemande off the heat and give them a minute or two, no more, until the edges ruffle. Held in simmering sauce they tighten into rubber and weep liquor that thins the sauce.
- Allemande sauceA velouté (white roux with veal or chicken stock) finished with egg yolk and cream and sharpened with lemon. It is not a supermarket item and must be made; Escoffier later reclassified it as a derivative of velouté rather than a sauce in its own right.
- "White broth"Unsalted light veal or chicken stock, cooked without browning the bones. Use a pale, unsalted stock and season at the end, since these sauces reduce.
- TeacupfulsA teacupful in kitchen books of this period runs roughly 6 fl oz, three-quarters of a cup, but it was never a standardized measure. For the ravigote, two and a half teacupfuls of white sauce to one and a half of broth is best read as a ratio of about 5:3 and adjusted to the consistency you want.
- CroustadeA hollowed case of bread, deep-fried or oven-crisped in butter and used as a vessel. A trimmed crustless loaf, hollowed and brushed with butter, browned at 375F until rigid, does the job; puff pastry vol-au-vent cases are the modern shortcut.
- Which soleThe book most likely means true Dover sole, though it says only 'soles' and nothing about where the fish came from. Domestic "sole" at a fish counter is usually flounder, fluke or petrale, which is thinner and softer and breaks up more readily. Handle it once and turn it once.
- The Normandy finishThe oven step is a gentle set under buttered paper, not a bake: 325 to 350F for eight to ten minutes. The sauce carries two egg yolks and will curdle if it boils, in the pan or in the oven.
- Mussels and chablisDiscard any mussel that will not close before cooking and any that stays shut after. Chablis stands in for any dry, unoaked white; the point is acidity without sweetness or vanilla from oak.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book draws heavily on the French professional repertoire of Carême and Dubois, transcribed for an American readership that had begun eating in hotels rather than at home. The four sole dishes here are named the way a brigade names things: à la Normande for the Normandy garnish of mussels, oysters and cream, Marechal for the gilded egg-and-crumb finish, which is traditionally -- though not verifiably -- explained by reference to a field marshal's braid, ravigote from the French ravigoter, "to revive," meaning the green herb-and-vinegar lift. Sole itself was the luxury, and its presence on a New York menu in the 1890s advertised the kitchen's connections as loudly as the truffle trimmings did.