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Turban of Sole
(Paris.) Trim two large soles or flounders into cutlets, fill them with a forcemeat of fish, bread, herbs, and egg, roll and arrange in a ring-shaped mould. Cook like a custard, in a pan of water, for 1 hour, or they can be tied securely with thread and cooked in stock. Drain the fillets, take off the string, arrange in a circle and fill the centre with a sauce made of 1 cup of white broth, 1 cup of oyster juice, some butter and flour, 1 dozen oysters, yolks of two eggs, salt, pepper, and chopped parsley.
A Parisian turban is fillets of flat fish coiled into a ring mould around a stuffing, steamed gently and unmoulded into a crown filled with sauce. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows how to fillet, poach and mount a velouté, so the useful work here is filling in what it leaves out.
- The hinge: heat, not timeOne hour in a bain-marie will turn sole to cotton. The recipe says only "a pan of water," so keep the heat gentle -- water bath on the stove or in a low oven -- and check at 20-25 minutes; the fish is done when it is just opaque and firm to a fingertip. If you poach the tied fillets in stock instead, they need 5-8 minutes at a bare shiver.
- "Cutlets"Almost certainly the fillets rather than crosswise chops, since they are to be filled and rolled. A sole yields four fillets, so two large fish give eight: skinned, trimmed square and flattened lightly between sheets of plastic so they will roll without cracking. A ring mould of about 6-7 inches will take them.
- Sole or flounderTrue Dover sole is firm enough to hold a coil; supermarket "sole" is usually flounder, plaice or another thin flatfish that tears easily. Buy the thickest fillets available, or use lemon sole. Overlap the fillets in the mould with the tail ends inward so they knit together as they set.
- The forcemeat"Fish, bread, herbs, and egg" means a panade-bound farce: about 8 oz of trimmings or a second white fish pureed with a slice of crustless bread soaked in milk and squeezed, one egg, parsley and chives, salt and pepper. Modern practice is to pulse it cold and chill it before spreading, or it will be loose.
- White brothA light, lightly seasoned stock: fish, veal or chicken, not milk and not a bouillon cube. Fish fumet made from the sole bones is the obvious choice here and takes about 20 minutes.
- Oyster juice and the oystersA dozen shucked oysters yield roughly half a cup of liquor, so top up with fumet to reach the cup called for, and strain it. Add the oysters to the finished sauce off the heat and let them plump for a minute or two; simmered, they shrink and go rubbery.
- Butter, flour, yolksRead this as a velouté finished with a liaison: 2 tablespoons each butter and flour cooked to a blond roux, the two cups of liquid whisked in, then the yolks tempered with a little hot sauce and stirred back over low heat. Keep it below 180F or it will scramble.
- UnmouldingButter the mould heavily and line the bottom with a disc of parchment. Let the turban rest five minutes, blot the liquid that has wept out, then invert onto a warm platter before filling the centre.
- YieldServes four as a first course, or two generously as a main. It does not reheat; the sauce breaks and the fish tightens.
The turban belongs to the decorative side of nineteenth-century French service, where a border mould, a ring of pastry or a crown of fillets gave a dish height and a hollow centre for its garnish -- the same logic that produced the vol-au-vent and the timbale. Sole suits the form because Paris kitchens received it in quantity from the Channel ports and because its fillets are long, thin and pliable enough to be coiled. The oyster and egg-yolk sauce is a plain velouté aux huitres. That the recipe is headed simply "(Paris.)" suggests what kind of book this may be: a traveller's collection, one might infer from that single heading, in which each dish stands as a souvenir of a city, written for readers who were expected to recognise a French method from a sketch of it rather than a full set of instructions.