No. 1273

Soles a la Marguery—Fillets

Filets de Soles a la Marguery

Raise the fillets from two clean, skinned soles; fold in two, pare nicely and season, range them on a buttered baking dish and bestrew the surface with shallots and mushroom peelings: moisten to cover with a white wine court bouillon (No. 39) and allow the liquid to come to a boil, then finish cooking the fillets in a slow oven. Drain them off singly, and dress on a dish; garnish one side with shrimp tails, and the other with blanched oysters, from which the hard parts have been removed, or mussels. Keep the whole very warm. Strain the broth the soles were cooked in, reduce it to a half-glaze, thicken with a mere spoonful of Normande sauce (No. 509) and finish with a piece of fresh lobster butter (No. 580); pour this over the fillets and garnishings, then glaze the sauce with a gas salamander (Fig. 123); two minutes will suffice for this. When the fish is ready to be served, brush the surface with thin lines of red butter (No. 580).

← No. 1272 Soles a la Lutece Sole, Flounder & Turbot No. 1274 Soles a la Normande →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stock, sauces and compound butters already standing by, so most of the work here is in the cross-references. Once the white wine court bouillon, the Normande and the lobster butter are accounted for, the cooking itself takes minutes.

The hinge: barely cook the fishFolded fillets in a low oven (a "slow oven" is generally read as somewhere around 300F, though Ranhofer gives no figure) should be done in roughly 8-10 minutes, when they turn opaque and just resist a fingertip. Ranhofer's "slow oven" is deliberate; held at a boil the sole shreds and weeps, and the whole point of the dish is intact fillets under a glossy sauce.
What the numbers meanNo. 39 is a court bouillon of white wine, water, aromatic vegetables and herbs — dry white wine cut with a little fish stock or water does the job. No. 509, sauce Normande, is a fish velouté enriched with egg yolk, cream and mushroom liquor; only a spoonful is called for, as a binder rather than a sauce. No. 580 covers both lobster butter (soft butter pounded with cooked lobster shell and coral, then strained) and red butter, a related coral-tinted butter used here for the finishing lines of colour.
Sole and its substitutesHe means European Dover sole, which yields four small fillets from a fish. Most fish sold as "sole" in North America is flounder; use it, or lemon sole, petrale or fluke, choosing thin fillets of even thickness so they fold neatly. Two soles give eight folded fillets, a first course for four.
Mushroom peelingsA thrift item from a kitchen that trimmed mushrooms all day, used purely for flavour and then strained out. Sliced mushroom stems or a spoonful of mushroom trimmings serve the same purpose.
Blanched oystersDip shucked oysters in their own hot liquor for under a minute, until the edges just ruffle, and lift them out. The "hard parts" are the tough muscle where the oyster was attached. Anything longer and they shrink to erasers. Cooked mussels, shelled, are the stated alternative.
Shrimp tailsPeeled cooked shrimp, small ones, poached briefly and drained. They go on to hot fish and under hot sauce, so cook them barely and let the plate finish them.
Reducing to half-glazeStrain the cooking liquid and boil it hard until it is syrupy and coats a spoon; only a few spoonfuls will be left. Only then whisk in the Normande and swirl in the cold lobster butter off the heat; boiling after the butter goes in will split the sauce.
SalamanderThe gas salamander was an overhead radiant grill used to glaze sauces. A broiler set high, with the dish close to the element for a minute or two, does the same. Watch it continuously: the sauce is meant to blister and gloss, not brown.

A Little History

The dish is named for Nicolas Marguery, whose Paris restaurant on the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle made filets de sole Marguery famous in the last quarter of the nineteenth century — sole poached in white wine, garnished with shrimp and mussels or oysters, and glazed under a salamander. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, compiled The Epicurean (1894) as a working record of exactly this sort of contemporary Parisian repertoire alongside American dishes, and its numbered cross-references show how a professional kitchen actually operated: the sauce, the court bouillon and the compound butters were standing preparations, and a dish like this was assembled from them in minutes. The dish crossed the Atlantic more than once; a well-known story, generally repeated rather than documented, has an American restaurateur sending a cook to Paris to work in Marguery's kitchen until he had learned the sauce. Whether or not that happened, the recipe's presence here confirms that by the 1890s New York's grandest kitchen expected to reproduce a Paris house specialty on demand.