No. 2392

Tourte of Fillets of Soles a la Financiere

Tourte de Filets de Soles a la Financiere

Make a band tart the same as explained in No. 173; remove and detach it from the baking sheet, dress on a dish and keep warm. Cook five or six well-pared sole fillets in butter, having them seasoned and cut into escalops, laying them in a sautoir with sliced truffles, a few dozen poached oysters and small fish quenelles (No. 90) molded with a small coffeespoon (No. 155), then poached; add some good lean veloute sauce (No. 416), reduced with the broth from the truffles, mushrooms and oysters. Dress this garnishing in a dome in the empty tart, ornament the surface with two sole fillets decorated with truffles, two large cooked crawfish, their tails shelled, and four large quenelles, each one having a truffle lozenge placed on the center. Between the quenelles and the fillets lay a mushroom head, turned (No. 118) and cooked very white; on top place a small round scooped-out quenelle, and on this a round peeled truffle; glaze this truffle and the fillets of sole, cover the mushrooms with a little veloute sauce and serve more of it as a separate sauce.

← No. 2391 Tourte of Chicken Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2393 Turban of Fillets of Flukes or Smelts-Streak →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's showpiece: a baked pastry band filled with a creamy ragout of sole, oysters, quenelles and truffle, then built up into an ornamented dome. It reads as one paragraph but it is four or five separate preparations assembled at the last minute, and the assembly is the point.

The hinge: everything is cooked separately, then combinedSole, oysters and quenelles each go into the sautoir already cooked or poached; the velouté only binds them and warms them through. If you stew the mixture together the sole shreds and the oysters turn to rubber.
"A band tart" (No. 173)A pastry base with a raised border of pastry strips fixed around the edge, baked so the border rises into a wall; the details are in the cross-reference, not here. Modern equivalent: roll puff pastry, cut a base, cut 1-inch strips, fix them around the perimeter with egg wash, dock the center, bake in a hot oven until risen and dry, then press down the middle to make the well.
SautoirA wide, straight-sided shallow pan — a sauteuse or a modern saute pan. Not a saucepan; the point is surface area so the fish cooks fast and the sauce reduces.
"Lean velouté" (No. 416)Velouté maigre — a white roux slackened with fish stock rather than veal or chicken. Ranhofer expects it reduced with the strained cooking liquors from the truffles, mushrooms and oysters, which is where nearly all the flavor of the dish comes from. Do not discard those liquors.
Oysters and sole timingPoach the oysters in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, roughly a minute, and lift them out. Escalops of sole in butter need two to three minutes a side at most. Both are then held and reheated in the sauce off a hard boil.
Quenelles by coffeespoonA fish forcemeat (pike or sole, panada, egg, cream) shaped in two small spoons into three-sided ovals and poached in barely trembling salted water at about 170F. Boiling water breaks them. The "large quenelles" for the top are the same mixture in a dessertspoon or piped into buttered molds.
Truffles and crawfishFresh black truffle at this scale is out of most reach; jarred whole winter truffle, or truffle peelings for the sauce with a few thin slices for the decoration, gets you the aroma. Crawfish means freshwater crayfish, boiled whole, the tail meat shelled and the head and claws left on as ornament — whole cooked crayfish are sold frozen, and large head-on shrimp will read the same on the plate.
"Glaze" the truffle and filletsBrush with reduced fish glaze (glace de poisson) or heavily reduced velouté for a lacquered shine, not with a sugar glaze. "Turned" mushrooms (No. 118) are fluted caps cooked in water with butter and lemon so they stay white.
YieldRanhofer gives no number; on the quantities here it would plausibly serve eight to ten as an entrée at a long-form dinner. Assemble at the last possible moment: the pastry begins to soften as soon as the sauced garnish goes in.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked in some thirty years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the house style at full stretch — a dish whose structural logic is vertical. A la financière is one of the old French classical garnishes, traditionally a rich Madeira-scented ragout of quenelles, truffles, mushrooms, olives and cockscombs served with sweetbreads or poultry; here Ranhofer builds a lean, or maigre, version of it out of the sea, swapping oysters and crayfish for the offal and a fish velouté for the brown sauce. The cross-references scattered through the text — to the band tart, the quenelle forcemeat, the velouté, the turned mushrooms — are how the whole book works: Ranhofer wrote for professionals who already had those preparations standing in the kitchen, and a recipe like this one is less a set of instructions than a plan for assembling things that already exist.