No. 1274

Soles a la Normande

Filets de Soles Normande

Raise the fillets from four medium sized soles weighing about a pound each; remove the skin, pare them neatly and fold in two. Put them on a buttered baking sheet, season with salt, pepper and chopped onions and moisten to their height with white wine and mushroom broth or else court boullion (No. 39), let the liquid come to a boil, then set the pan in a moderate oven to leave until the fish is well cooked, basting frequently with the stock; drain off the fish and strain the stock, then reduce it with some veloute (No. 415) and thicken with raw egg-yolks, cream and fresh butter. Dress the sole fillets in a circle on a dish and garnish the inside border with half circular-shaped croutons three-sixteenth of an inch thick and an inch and a quarter in diameter; heat the dish slightly, dip the flat side of the crouton in beaten eggs, stick it to the plate, besprinkle with melted butter and color in a hot oven. Around the fillets of sole arrange some quenelles molded in a coffeespoon (No. 155), some mussels or oysters from which the hard parts have been removed and channeled and turned mushroom heads (No. 118), then cover the whole with the sauce. Garnish the inside of the circle with fillets of smelts or milts a la villeroi, drip over the surface thin lines of meat glaze (No. 402), using a brush for the purpose, and lay trussed crawfish on top.

← No. 1273 Soles a la Marguery—Fillets Sole, Flounder & Turbot No. 1275 Soles a la Richelieu—Fillets →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's cross-references make this look harder than it is: strip away the garnishes and it is fillets of sole poached in wine and mushroom liquor, the poaching liquid reduced and finished with yolks, cream and butter. Build the sauce carefully and the rest is assembly.

The hinge: the liaisonOnce the raw yolks and cream go into the reduced sauce it must not boil, or it curdles into scrambled egg. Take the pan off direct heat, temper a ladle of hot sauce into the yolk-and-cream mixture, return it, and hold it below 180F while the butter goes in off the heat.
Oven temperatureThe book calls only for "a moderate oven" and gives no figures; by modern reckoning that is somewhere around 350F. The fillets are only there long enough to set — folded fillets from a 1 lb sole need roughly 8 to 10 minutes, and they are done when barely opaque. Judge by the fish, not the clock.
The fishWhole Dover sole at a pound each yields four small fillets apiece, so four fish give sixteen fillets. Grey sole, lemon sole, petrale or flounder all work; the point is a thin, firm white fillet that can be folded in two without breaking.
Velouté and glazeNo. 415 is the book's velouté, a pale roux moistened with white stock; for a fish dish a fish-stock version is the sensible reading. Reduced with the strained poaching liquor, roughly half a cup should be enough for this quantity. No. 402, meat glaze, is stock reduced to a syrup; a spoonful of thick demi-glace brushed on in fine lines gives the same effect.
Shellfish timingThe mussels or oysters are added to the finished dish, not cooked in the sauce. Oysters need only to be warmed through — a minute in their own liquor — and mussels only until they open. Anything longer and they tighten to rubber under the sauce.
Milts and villeroi"Milts" are soft roe, the male fish's sperm sacs, sold as shirako or laitance where they are sold at all; smelt fillets are the easier option. À la villeroi means coated in thick allemande or velouté, chilled until firm, then breadcrumbed and fried.
CroûtonsThree-sixteenths of an inch is a scant quarter-inch slice; an inch and a quarter is a standard round cutter, halved. Sticking them to a warm platter with beaten egg is a nineteenth-century presentation trick and can be skipped without loss to the eating.
QuenellesMolded in a coffeespoon means small — about a teaspoon of forcemeat, shaped between two spoons and poached in barely simmering salted water for three or four minutes until they float and feel set.
YieldServes four to six as a fish course. The crawfish are decoration; leave them, the milts and the glaze lines out and the dish is still sole in sauce normande.

A Little History

Sauce normande — fish stock and velouté enriched with yolks, cream and butter, with mussels, mushrooms and shrimp or crayfish as garnish — is often said to come from the Norman coast, where sole, cider-country cream and mussels all came from the same few miles of shoreline, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and it had become a fixed piece of the classical French repertoire well before Charles Ranhofer set it down. Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for most of the second half of the nineteenth century, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working system printed whole: some three and a half thousand recipes, each leaning on others by number so that a single fish dish can require a court bouillon, a velouté, a forcemeat, a meat glaze and a turned mushroom, all filed elsewhere. The structure tells you what kind of kitchen it came from — one with a saucier, a garde-manger and a pastry cook already at their stations, where no one cook was ever expected to make all of this alone.