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Recipes: Fillet
Fillet a sole and put it in a sauté-pan with one and a half ounces of butter and a clove of garlic with one cut in it, then sprinkle over it a little chopped fennel, salt and pepper, and let it cook for a few minutes. Turn over the fillets when they are sufficiently cooked on one side, take out the garlic and cover the fish with a purée of tomatoes at the last.
No. 63. Sogliole alla Veneziana (Sole) Ingredients Sole, anchovies, butter, bacon, onion, stock, Chablis, salt, nutmeg, parsley, Spanish olives, one bay leaf.
A short Italian-style sauté of sole in butter with garlic, fennel and tomato. Note that the entry runs straight into the ingredient list for the following recipe (No. 63, Sogliole alla Veneziana), whose method is not printed here — cook only the first paragraph.
- "A clove of garlic with one cut in it"A printing tangle for a whole peeled clove with a single slit cut into it. Scored but intact, it perfumes the butter and can be lifted out cleanly before serving, which is exactly what the recipe asks you to do.
- Fennel'Chopped fennel' most likely means the feathery green fronds of Florence or wild fennel rather than the dried seed. About a tablespoon of chopped fronds suits two fillets; if you substitute seed, a scant quarter teaspoon, crushed, is enough.
- Purée of tomatoesPurée of tomatoes -- Here this most likely means fresh ripe tomatoes cooked down and passed through a sieve, roughly the consistency of a loose sauce, though tinned tomato conserve was also available by this date. Modern canned tomato paste is far more concentrated; use passata, or sieved fresh tomatoes briefly reduced with salt.
- Timing"A few minutes" is generous for sole. Skinned fillets of a pound-and-a-half fish need about two minutes on the first side and one on the second; they are done when the flesh turns opaque and no longer springs back. Overcooked sole goes cottony and shreds when turned.
- Butter and heatOne and a half ounces is three tablespoons, ample for two fillets. Keep the pan at medium — the butter must foam but not brown, or the garlic scorches and the fennel turns bitter.
- Order of operationsThe tomato purée goes on "at the last," off the direct heat or with the pan barely warm. It is a finishing sauce, not something to be reduced with the fish, which would steam the fillets and dull the fennel.
- YieldOne sole, filleted, gives two to four fillets and serves one generously or two as a first course. Scale the butter rather than crowding the pan; fillets laid on top of one another will poach instead of sauté.
- The truncated Venetian recipeNo. 63 lists anchovies, bacon, onion, stock, Chablis, nutmeg, parsley, Spanish olives and bay, but the instructions are missing from this page. It is not makeable as printed.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was compiled by Mrs W. G. Waters and framed, after Boccaccio, as ten days of talk and cookery among a house party — a device for smuggling a genuinely Italian repertoire into English kitchens at a time when Anglo-French cookery dominated the printed book. Sole cooked with garlic, fennel and tomato is a coastal Mediterranean treatment rather than a Venetian one, and it shows the book's habit of grouping variations on a single fish across consecutive numbered entries; the neighbouring Sogliole alla Veneziana, with its anchovy, bacon and Chablis, belongs to a quite different, richer tradition. The technique of slitting a garlic clove, cooking it in butter and then removing it is a very old way of getting scent without pungency.