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Filets of Sole, White Wine
Cut off the head from a very fresh sole of three and a half pounds, make an incision on both sides, from head to tail, right in the centre, then with a small knife lift up the filets from the bones. Neatly skin and free them from any small bones that may adhere. Cut each filet into three equal, slanting pieces. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Lay the filets in a lightly buttered sautoire, one beside another, add a finely sliced onion, two branches parsley, one tablespoon vinegar and one gill white wine. Cover the fish with a buttered paper, set on the range and let boil for five minutes. Then set in the oven to bake for fifteen minutes. Remove, gently lift up the filets with a skimmer, dress them on a hot dish and keep hot. Mix in a saucepan one tablespoon butter with two tablespoons flour. Strain the fish gravy into this pan, add half gill cream, the juice of quarter of a sound lemon, two saltspoons salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg; sharply mix with a whisk until the sauce comes to a boil, then let boil for five minutes. Pour the sauce over the filets and serve. COTELETTES OF TENDERLOIN OF BEEF, ST. HILAIRE Hash very finely one and a half pounds raw tenderloin of beef with quarter of a pound fresh beef marrow. Place in a bowl; season with one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Hash one goodsized, sound bean of garlic with three branches fresh parsley and add to the hash with half gill cream; mix briskly with a spoon for five minutes.
Spread on a corner of the table two ounces fresh bread crumbs. Divide the hash into six equal parts. Gently roll in the crumbs and give them nice cotelette forms. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan. Place the cotellettes in the pan and slowly fry for five minutes on each side. Remove, drain well, dress on a hot dish, crownlike. Pour over them a cabaret sauce. Arrange six Spanish sweet peppers over the cotelettes and serve.
Two dishes run together on this page: a poached-then-baked sole in a white wine sauce, and a fried raw-beef "cotelette" that reads like a Gallicised hamburger. Both assume a cook who can fillet a flatfish and keep a hot dish waiting.
- Buy filets, not the whole fishA 3½ lb sole means a whole flatfish, and after head, frame and skin you are left with roughly 1½ lb of meat. True Dover sole is rare and costly outside Europe; grey sole, lemon sole, petrale or flounder all behave the same way here. Ask for skinned filets and skip the first third of the recipe.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the wine is 4 fl oz and the cream 2 fl oz. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon — meaning the sauce takes ½ tsp salt, ¼ tsp cayenne and ⅛ tsp nutmeg. That cayenne is assertive for so small a quantity of sauce; taste as you go.
- Sautoire and buttered paperA sautoire is a straight-sided sauté pan; any wide shallow pan that goes from burner to oven will do. The buttered paper is a cartouche — parchment cut to the pan and laid directly on the fish so it steams rather than dries.
- The oven temperature is unstatedFilippini gives no heat for the fifteen-minute bake. A moderate-to-quick oven, 375–400°F, is what the method implies.
- Cut the cooking timeFive minutes of boiling plus fifteen in the oven will reduce thin sole filets to cotton. Bring the wine and vinegar to a bare simmer, slide the pan into the oven, and pull the fish at 6–8 minutes, when it is just opaque and flakes at the thick end.
- The sauce is a beurre manié, not a rouxThe sauce is thickened with a raw paste, not a cooked roux -- One tablespoon butter to two of flour is closer to a beurre manié than to a roux, though heavier on flour than a true beurre manié. Whisk the strained hot cooking liquor into it off the heat to avoid lumps, then return to the boil. Five minutes of boiling is needed to cook out the raw flour taste, but the cream and lemon are better added in the last minute.
- The beef cotelettesBeef marrow can be ordered from a butcher; if you cannot get it, the mixture will simply be leaner and drier. Have the tenderloin coarsely ground or chop it yourself and keep everything cold — five minutes of brisk mixing warms the fat. "Cabaret sauce" is a house sauce of the period; a sharp tomato-and-pepper sauce is the closest modern reading, and the "Spanish sweet peppers" are pimientos.
- YieldThe sole serves four as a main course, six as a fish course. The cotelettes are explicitly divided into six.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) is essentially his professional repertoire set down for domestic use — hence the assumption that the reader owns a sautoire and knows what a saltspoon holds. Sole poached in white wine with an enriched, thickened cooking liquor is one of the foundation dishes of nineteenth-century French restaurant cookery, the parent of the whole family of sole au vin blanc, bonne femme and Marguery preparations that made a plain flatfish the most prestigious thing on a menu. The second recipe shows the other half of Filippini's world: minced raw tenderloin, shaped, crumbed and fried, given a saint's name and a garnish of pimientos so that what is fundamentally a beef patty could be sold at Delmonico's prices. The garlic is worth noticing — American cookbooks of the period are often said to have been wary of it, and Filippini's willingness to call for "one goodsized, sound bean of garlic" marks the book as continental rather than domestic.