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Filet of Sole, Trovatore
Procure a very fresh sole of three and a half pounds. Lift up the filets, skin them, then cut each filet into three slanting, equal pieces and fold up each piece. Split six red Spanish sweet peppers in two, arrange in a lightly buttered sautoire and lay a filet on each pepper. Season with a half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons paprika and half saltspoon Spanish saffron, adding half ounce butter, half gill white wine and two tablespoons port or Malaga. Cover the filets with a lightly buttered paper, boil for five minutes on the range, then set in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, take off the paper, dress the filets on a hot dish, crown shape, and arrange one piece pepper on top of each filet. Pour a gill tomato sauce into the fish gravy, briskly boil for eight minutes, then pour the gravy over the filets and serve.
A straightforward braise of sole on sweet peppers, written for a professional kitchen that assumed you knew the oven temperature and could judge doneness by eye. Two things need attention: the archaic measures, and the cooking time.
- The hinge: total cooking timeFive minutes on the stove plus twenty in the oven will reduce folded sole fillets to cotton wool. Modern practice is to bring the liquid to a simmer, then give the covered pan 8-10 minutes in the oven until the fish is just opaque and flakes at the thickest fold.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the original cook worked by feel. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for this kind of shallow braise.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 4 tablespoons and the gill of tomato sauce is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon; two saltspoons paprika is half a teaspoon, and half a saltspoon of saffron is an eighth of a teaspoon, which for saffron is a generous pinch.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan (the sautoire proper; the sloping-sided pan is the sauteuse), wide enough to hold twelve pepper halves in one layer. It must be ovenproof, since the dish goes from range to oven in the same vessel.
- The soleThree and a half pounds is a very large flatfish; in a New York kitchen of this date the name may cover Dover sole or a local flounder. Expect something over a pound of trimmed fillet. Grey sole, lemon sole or plaice fillets, about 6 oz per person, work in the same way; skinless fillets from the fish counter skip the first two steps.
- Red Spanish sweet peppersProbably pimientos rather than bell peppers: sweet and mild, now often sold roasted and jarred, with piquillos the closest common equivalent. If you use fresh bell pepper, roast and peel it first, since the tough skin will not soften in ten minutes.
- MalagaA sweet fortified wine from Andalusia, still made and still sold; a tawny port or a cream sherry stands in without altering the character.
- The buttered paperA cartouche, cut to the diameter of the pan and buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the fillets moist without sealing the pan, and it is worth cutting a small vent in the centre.
- The sauceBoiling the pan liquid with tomato sauce for eight minutes after the fish is out is a reduction step, not further cooking of the fish. Keep the plated fillets covered and warm while it thickens.
- YieldTwelve pieces of fish on twelve pepper halves: six servings as a first course, four as a main.
Dishes named for operas were a standing habit in the grand hotel and restaurant kitchens of the late nineteenth century, and Trovatore points at Verdi's Il Trovatore of 1853, a piece set in Spain. The naming is doing real work here: the Spanish peppers, the paprika, the saffron and the Malaga wine are all cues to the opera's setting, in the same way that a garnish called Florentine means spinach or Dubarry means cauliflower. Filippini, who spent his career at Delmonico's in New York, was writing for cooks who worked from a repertoire organised by these labels, and his international collections gathered such compositions alongside genuinely regional cooking. Sole treated this way, folded and braised on a bed under buttered paper with wine and a tomato-enriched pan sauce, belongs squarely to the classical French method of the period, whatever nationality the name claims for it.