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Filets of Sole, Mayonnaise-Moreno
Lift up filets from a fresh three-and-a-half-pound flounder, skin and cut each in three slanting, equal pieces, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, lightly roll in flour, dip in beaten egg, then roll them in fresh bread crumbs. Arrange in frying basket, fry in boiling fat for eight minutes, lift up, drain on cloth and sprinkle a little salt over. Dress on a hot dish with folded napkin, decorate with six quarters lemon, a little parsley greens, and serve with Mayonnaise-Moreno sauce separately.
A straightforward deep-fried breaded fish, written for a kitchen that fried in a basket over a range and served on linen. Two things need attention: the frying time and the sauce, which the original assumes you can look up elsewhere in the book.
- Eight minutes is too longFilleted flounder cut into three pieces gives thin, tapering strips that cook through in about three minutes at frying temperature. Eight minutes will dry the flesh and darken the crumb coating well past golden. Fry until the crust is set and light brown, then lift.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously around what is dropped into it, roughly 350-375F. Below that the crumbs absorb grease, above it they colour before the fish is warm.
- Sole or flounderThe title says sole, the method says flounder, and both were used loosely in American kitchens of the period for any small flatfish. A 3.5 lb whole flatfish yields roughly 1.25-1.5 lb of trimmed fillet; substitute the same weight of flounder, sole, plaice or fluke fillets and skip the filleting.
- Mayonnaise-MorenoThe recipe expects the sauce to be found elsewhere in the book rather than improvised, so look it up if you have the full text; failing that, any well-seasoned mayonnaise served cold alongside suits the dish.
- The breading orderFlour, egg, crumbs, in that order, and press the crumbs on firmly. Let the coated pieces rest ten minutes before frying so the egg sets against the flour and the crust stays on in the fat.
- Fresh bread crumbsMeans crumbs rubbed from the interior of a day-old loaf, not the dry sandy commercial kind. They fry lighter and browner, but they also colour faster, which is another reason not to hold the fish in the fat.
- ServingThe folded napkin on the platter absorbed drips and is optional now; a wire rack does the same work better. The six lemon quarters point to six portions.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), a compendium written by a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the style of the instruction is pure professional kitchen: lift the filets, dress on a hot dish, serve the sauce separately. Fried fillets of sole with a cold sauce were a staple of the American hotel and restaurant repertoire in that era, when deep frying in a wire basket had become routine in commercial kitchens well before it was common at home. The named sauce is characteristic of the period too. Grand-restaurant cooking labelled compound sauces and garnishes after people, places and patrons, and dozens of such names circulated in printed menus and cookbooks without any surviving record of who was being honoured; Moreno appears to be one of these, meaningful to Filippini's readers and opaque now.