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Sole Au Four
With a sharp knife make a light incision around the head of a three-pound fresh flounder, then with a towel pull off skin. Season with a teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon paprika, lightly roll in flour, then in beaten egg, and finally in freshly prepared bread crumbs. Lightly butter a baking dish, place in sole, pour one and a half tablespoons melted butter over, then set in oven for twenty-five minutes, being careful to baste fish with butter once in a while. Bring it to oven door, turn, squeeze in juice of half a lemon, sprinkle over a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, reset in oven for twenty minutes more, basting it frequently, remove and send to table.
A whole flat fish, breaded and oven-baked rather than pan-fried — straightforward once you supply the two things the original omits: an oven temperature and any sense of doneness.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A breaded whole flatfish of this size wants 400F, hot enough to set and colour the crumb without drying the flesh. Below that the coating goes pale and greasy.
- The total time is longTwenty-five minutes plus twenty is 45 minutes for a 3 lb flatfish, which will overshoot badly. A whole flounder of that weight is done at 20-30 minutes at 400F; the flesh should lift cleanly from the backbone and read 145F at the thickest point behind the head.
- "Sole" here is flounderThe title is French kitchen convention — on American menus and in American markets of the period almost any small flatfish was sold and cooked as sole. The recipe itself names flounder, and true Dover sole is a different fish entirely.
- SkinningThe towel trick works on the dark upper skin: score behind the head, get a grip with a dry cloth or paper towel, and pull toward the tail in one steady motion. Leave the pale underside skin on — it holds the fish together in the dish.
- Turning a whole fishThe instruction to turn it halfway is the risky moment with a breaded fillet-side. Two wide spatulas, or simply skip the turn and baste more often; the crumb browns adequately from the top heat alone.
- Bread crumbs"Freshly prepared" means crumbs from the crumb of a day-old loaf, torn or grated, not the fine dry commercial kind. They are coarser and crisp better under butter.
- Butter for bastingA tablespoon and a half is thin cover for a whole fish. Melt three or four and keep the pastry brush going, or the crumb on the raised edges will scorch before the middle is warm.
- YieldA 3 lb whole flounder serves three to four once head, frame and fins are accounted for. Serve with the pan butter and lemon spooned over.
Sole au four — simply "sole in the oven" — belongs to the plainest end of the French repertoire, and the French title on a dish the recipe itself calls flounder says more about naming than about cooking. Flatfish landed on the Atlantic coast were often marketed as sole regardless of species, a habit that persists in fish counters today, and a French title lent a domestic flounder the dignity of restaurant cooking. The technique itself, flour then egg then crumb, is the standard *à l'anglaise* coating. Many books of this era did not specify oven temperatures, since domestic ranges generally lacked thermostats before the 1920s; a cook judged heat by hand or by how fast a scrap of paper or a sprinkle of flour browned, and the written recipe assumed she already knew.