No. 1277

Soles a la Trouville

Suppress the heads and skin from two well cleaned soles; split them down on the dark side in order to remove the large bone; season the fish, and fill in the empty space with a fish farce (No. 90) with cooked fine herbs (No. 387), mixed with a salpicon of blanched oysters. Range the soles on a baking dish or sheet, moisten them with a court bouillon with white wine (No. 39); season, and let the liquid reach boiling point, then finish cooking the soles in a moderate oven. After they are done, strain their stock and reduce it to a half-glaze; incorporate into it slowly some reduced veloute (No. 415), also a few spoonfuls of oyster broth. Dress the soles on a dish, cover them over with the sauce, and surround the sides with small quenelles (No. 90) made with red butter (No. 580), and the ends with a cluster of fried oysters. Send a surplus of the sauce to the table in a sauce-boat.

← No. 1276 Soles a la Rochelaise Sole, Flounder & Turbot No. 1278 Soles, Venetian Style—Fillets →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in cross-references: nearly every component here points to another number in The Epicurean, so the recipe is really an assembly order for five separate preparations. Read it as a plan rather than a procedure.

The hinge: bone the sole from the dark sideCut down the length of the backbone on the dark-skinned side and work the fillets loose from the frame in two pockets, leaving the fish attached at the tail (Ranhofer has already had you remove the heads). That envelope is what holds the farce; if you split through, the stuffing can weep out into the cooking liquid.
Fish farce (No. 90)A pounded fish forcemeat, seasoned and sieved; Ranhofer's fish quenelle forcemeats are variously bound with panada and butter or with egg and cream, so check No. 90 rather than assuming a modern mousseline. A food processor does in a minute what the mortar did in twenty; keep everything cold and add any cream last so it does not break.
Cooked fine herbs (No. 387)Not raw chopped herbs. Cooked fine herbs in this period are generally shallot and mushroom sweated in butter with parsley and a little reduction — closer to a dry duxelles. It goes into the farce as seasoning, not bulk.
Salpicon and quenellesA salpicon is simply a small, even dice. The quenelles are the same No. 90 farce, shaped in two spoons and poached in barely trembling salted water — never boiling, or they go porous.
Red butter (No. 580)Compound butter pounded with lobster or crayfish coral and shell, then strained. Its main function here is colour: it tints the garnish quenelles pink against the white sauce, though it carries shellfish flavour as well.
Court bouillon with white wine (No. 39)Typically water, dry white wine, sliced onion and carrot, herbs and seasoning. The recipe says only to moisten the soles, so the liquid should barely come up the sides — a shallow braise, and it becomes the sauce.
Moderate ovenRanhofer gives no temperatures; a moderate oven is usually read as somewhere around 325–350F. The liquid is brought to the boil on the stovetop first so the oven only has to finish the job; two boned soles need roughly 10 to 15 minutes, until the farce is set.
The oystersBlanched means dipped in their own liquor just until the edges ruffle, a matter of seconds. The oyster broth folded into the sauce at the end is that strained liquor. Anything approaching a simmer turns oysters to rubber, and this recipe touches them twice — once blanched into the farce, once fried for the garnish.
Half-glaze and veloutéReduce the strained cooking liquid until it is syrupy and coats a spoon, then add the reduced velouté off the heat and slowly, so it does not split. Finish with the oyster liquor by the spoonful, tasting: oyster broth is salty and the glaze is already concentrated.
Sourcing and yieldThe chapter groups sole, flounder and turbot together, and in 1890s New York flounder often stood in for sole; witch, lemon sole or a thick flounder will bone and stuff the same way, though flounder is more fragile. The recipe states no yield, but two whole soles at this scale would serve about two.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York across two stints, roughly 1862–1876 and 1879–1896, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole repertoire in one volume — hence the numbered cross-references, which let him write several thousand recipes without repeating a forcemeat. The name points to Trouville-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast, a fishing harbour that became a fashionable bathing resort in the mid-nineteenth century; dishes labelled à la Trouville, like the closely related à la Normande, are generally recognised by the shellfish garnish — oysters, mussels, shrimp — set around a flat white fish in a cream-enriched white-wine sauce. That Ranhofer could call for blanched oysters in the stuffing, oyster broth in the sauce and a cluster of fried oysters at each end says a good deal about the period: oysters were cheap and abundant in New York in the 1890s, harvested from beds in the harbour and the Sound, and were used as a bulk ingredient in a way that reads as extravagance now.