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Filet of Sole, Higgins
Lift up the filets from a three-pound fresh sole, skin and cut each filet into three slanting equal pieces, neatly flatten a little, then fold them. Arrange in a frying pan, add a half ounce butter, half gill white wine, half gill water, the juice of a quarter lemon, a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika; cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, boil on the range for five minutes, then set in oven for twenty minutes. Remove, press a spinach in cream on a baking dish; arrange the filets, one overlapping another, crown-like, over the spinach; place one canned mushroom on top of each filet. Mix in a small saucepan one tablespoon butter with two tablespoons flour, heat for one minute, then pour in the fish gravy; add a half gill cream and two tablespoons grated Swiss cheese and mix with a spoon until it comes to a boil. Pour the sauce and sprinkle a tablespoon bread crumbs over the filets, set in the oven for fifteen minutes, remove, decorate all around with thin half slices lemon and serve.
A restaurant-style baked fillet dish in the Delmonico's manner: poached fish, a bed of creamed spinach, a cheese-enriched sauce built on the cooking liquor. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to fillet a flatfish and can judge doneness by eye.
- The hinge: total cooking timeThe original's five minutes on the range, twenty in the oven, then a further fifteen after saucing is a long total for folded sole fillets and risks drying them. The recipe gives no oven temperature. Poach until just opaque, and treat the final oven stage as a browning step only — a few minutes under a hot broiler does the same job.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons: that is 1/4 cup white wine, 1/4 cup water, and 1/4 cup cream in the sauce.
- The fishA three-pound whole sole yields roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of trimmed fillet — four servings. True Dover sole is expensive and rarely sold whole outside specialist fishmongers; petrale sole, lemon sole, flounder or fluke behave the same way. Ask for a whole flatfish of about 3 lb and have it filleted, or buy 1 1/4 lb of fillets and skip the first sentence.
- "Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper"This is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the diameter of the pan, buttered side down, resting directly on the fish. It holds in steam without trapping enough to boil the fillets apart. Parchment does the work that waxed paper and foil do less well.
- "Boil on the range"Do not actually boil. Bring the liquid to a bare simmer — vigorous boiling breaks folded fillets and clouds the liquor you need for the sauce.
- Spinach in creamAssumed known in the kitchens of the period: spinach blanched, squeezed very dry, chopped and bound with cream or a little béchamel. About 1 1/2 lb of fresh spinach reduces to the right bed for four. "Press" means to spread and firm it into a flat layer so the fillets sit level.
- The sauceA blond roux slaked with the strained fish liquor, then cream and Swiss cheese — a fish velouté finished as a Mornay. Strain the liquor before adding it; there will be less than a cup, so add cream until it coats a spoon. Add the cheese off the heat or just as it comes up, and do not let it boil hard afterward or it will string.
- Canned mushroomsCanned button mushrooms appear routinely in recipes of this period. Fresh caps, trimmed and stewed briefly in butter and lemon juice, are closer to what the dish is reaching for.
- ServingFour portions as a main course, six as a fish course. It goes to the table in the baking dish it was glazed in; the lemon half-slices go on after the browning, not before.
This belongs to the tradition of à la carte fish dishes named for a customer — the practice in New York and Paris hotel dining rooms of the late nineteenth century, where a chef would christen a plate after the patron who first ordered it or for whom it was devised, and the name would then travel into print with no explanation of who "Higgins" was. The construction is pure grand-restaurant grammar of the period: fillets poached in wine under paper, set crown-like over a green purée, masked with a cheese sauce made from their own cooking liquor and flashed in the oven to glaze. Sole was the prestige flatfish of that kitchen because it holds its shape when folded and poached, which is why so many named sole preparations survive from these decades while the people they honored are forgotten. The appearance of canned mushrooms and grated Swiss cheese in a dish otherwise built on classical technique suggests how readily commercial products were absorbed into restaurant cooking.