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Recipes: Cover
Fillet a sole and interlard each piece with a bit of anchovy. Tie up the fillets and put them in a sauté-pan with two ounces of butter, a slice of bacon or ham, and a few small slices of onion. Cover half over with good stock and a glass of Chablis, and add salt, a pinch of nutmeg, a bunch of parsley, and a bay leaf. Cover with buttered paper, and cook on a slow fire for about an hour. Drain the fish, pass the liquor through a sieve, reduce it to the consistency of a thick sauce, and pour it over the fish. Garnish each fillet with a Spanish olive stuffed with anchovy.
No. 64. Sogliole alla Parmigiana (Sole) 1 Ingredients: Sole, Parmesan, butter, cream, cayenne. Fillet a sole and wipe each piece with a clean cloth, then place them in a fireproof dish, and put a small piece of butter on each fillet. Then make a good white sauce, and mix it with two tablespoonsful of grated Parmesan and half a gill of cream. Cover the fish well with the sauce, and bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes.
Two sole recipes run together here: a braised fillet finished with its own reduced cooking liquor, and a simpler baked fillet under Parmesan cream. Both are sound, but the first carries a timing no modern cook should follow.
- The hour on a slow fireSole fillets are done in six to eight minutes at a bare simmer; an hour reduces them to cotton wool. Braise them gently until just opaque, lift them out, then reduce the liquor separately for as long as it needs.
- Interlarding with anchovyThis means threading slivers of anchovy fillet through the flesh with a larding needle, as one would with pork fat. Laying a thin strip of anchovy along each fillet before rolling and tying achieves the same seasoning without shredding the fish.
- Buttered paperA cartouche: a round of paper cut to the pan's diameter, buttered and laid directly on the surface. Parchment does the job; it keeps the exposed top of the fillets moist while allowing some evaporation, which foil will not.
- A gillIn British measure a gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill of cream is about two and a half fluid ounces, roughly five tablespoons. The "glass of Chablis" in the first recipe is looser; treat it as about 5 fl oz of dry white wine.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally reckoned at somewhere around 350F. Twenty minutes at that heat is generous for thin sole fillets under sauce; check at twelve to fifteen minutes, when the sauce is bubbling at the edges and the fish flakes.
- Good stockThe original assumes a household stockpot. Fish stock or a light chicken stock both work; avoid anything heavily salted, since the liquor is reduced hard and the bacon and anchovy already contribute salt.
- The reduction is the dishEverything depends on boiling the strained liquor down until it coats a spoon. Do it in a wide pan over strong heat, taste before salting, and mount it with a knob of cold butter if it seems thin.
- Spanish olives stuffed with anchovyStill sold as such, usually pitted queen olives with anchovy paste. Rinse them if they are very briny, as the sauce will already be assertive.
- YieldOne sole yields four fillets, enough for two as a main course or four as a first course. Both recipes scale straightforwardly.
The Cook's Decameron (1901), compiled by Mrs W. G. Waters, dressed a collection of Italian recipes in a Boccaccian frame: ten people cooking and talking over ten days. Its purpose was frankly polemical dash to persuade English households that Italian cookery was something other than macaroni dash and the recipes show a kitchen already thoroughly cross-bred with France, as the Chablis, the buttered paper and the reduced braising liquor here make plain. Sogliole alla Parmigiana reflects what is often said to be the older, broader use of that name: not the layered aubergine dish but simply anything finished with grated Parmesan, though the origin and period sense of alla parmigiana are disputed, a Sicilian derivation from parmiciana, slats or shutters, also being argued. Sole itself was a prestige fish in Edwardian Britain, and its appearance in a book of Italian recipes says as much about the London fishmonger as about Italy.