No. 1281

Stuffed Soles—Fillets

Filets de Soles Farcis

Spread on a raised-edged buttered baking sheet a layer of quenelle forcemeat (No. 90) to the thickness of half an inch, smoothing well the surface. Take twelve fillets of soles, not too large, pare and season them properly, poach these slightly in a sautoir with melted butter; drain and let get partially cold under a light weight; pare them once more and range them at short distances from each other on the layer of forcemeat, placing them on the poached side. Brush over with melted butter and finish cooking in a slack oven as well as the forcemeat. After removing the pan from the oven, cut the forcemeat all around the fillets with the tip of a small knife, lift one after the other up with a palette, forcemeat and all, and dress them in two rows on a long dish, one overlapping the other; garnish between the rows with poached oysters and the ends with a bunch of crawfish tails. Cover the bottom of the dish and the oysters with a normande sauce (No. 509) serving more in a separate sauce-boat.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Ranhofer showpiece: fillets set on a sheet of fish mousseline, baked together, then cut out so each fillet arrives with its own base. The whole thing depends on two cross-references, so read those first.

The hinge: two-stage cookingThe fillets are barely set in butter first, weighted flat while cooling, then trimmed and baked on raw forcemeat. The pre-poach and the weight are presumably there to stop the fillets curling and shrinking away from the forcemeat as they finish.
Quenelle forcemeat (No. 90)A pounded fish forcemeat; check No. 90 for Ranhofer's exact composition, as his quenelle forcemeats vary and may use a panada as well as egg and cream. Whatever the formula, it must be firm enough to hold a half-inch layer without slumping; chill it before spreading. A food processor does the pounding in minutes.
Normande sauce (No. 509)A fish velouté finished with mushroom and oyster liquor, egg yolks and cream. Make it before the fish goes in the oven; it will not wait for you afterwards, and it must not boil once the yolks are in.
Slack ovenA cool oven; somewhere in the region of 275–325F is the usual modern reading. The point is to set the forcemeat through without letting it puff, weep or brown.
Sautoir and paletteA sautoir is a straight-sided shallow pan — any wide skillet does. A palette is a thin offset spatula, and you want the longest one you own for lifting each fillet with its forcemeat intact.
The oystersPoach them in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, roughly a minute; here they are a garnish, not a cooked component, and long cooking turns them rubbery.
Sole and crawfishTrue Dover sole is imported and expensive; twelve small fillets of flounder, fluke or lemon sole behave the same way. Cooked crawfish tails are sold frozen and peeled — thaw and warm them in butter rather than boiling them again.
YieldTwelve small fillets serve six as a first course, four as a main. The dish is meant to be dressed on one long platter and served from it.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894; its title page advertises about 3,500 recipes, built to be read together, which is why this one sends you off to No. 90 and No. 509 rather than repeating itself. The construction is grande cuisine of the period: farci here seems to mean not stuffed in the domestic sense but mounted on a forcemeat base, a technique that would let a brigade prepare and portion delicate fish in advance of service. Sauce normande is traditionally associated with Normandy's cream, butter and shellfish, though that derivation is tradition rather than documented fact; as a codified sauce it belongs to the restaurant kitchen rather than to any regional home cooking. Oysters were famously cheap and abundant in nineteenth-century New York.