Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [185]
FILET DE SOLE MARGUERY
Marguery’s, on the Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle in Paris, was a famous restaurant of the Belle Époque. It was celebrated for its picturesque rooms, ‘some oriental, others medieval, yet others recalling Potsdam’, for its lively and loquacious and mixed clientele – and for the great dish of Filets de sole Marguery.
Everyone was after the ‘secret’. Chefs all over Europe and America tried to imitate it. Every cookery book of the time had some stab at the recipe. One enthusiast who persuaded the recipe out of Monsieur Marguery was Claude Monet. He gave wonderful dinners in his yellow dining-room at Giverny, and undoubtedly saw how good the dish would look – as well as taste – on the yellow- and blue-rimmed dinner service he had designed for himself.
A much odder, greedier enthusiast was Diamond Jim Brady of New York, a man whose diamond rings matched his appetite. His favourite restaurant was Rector’s in New York. One night someone in his party there rhapsodized about the wonderful dish he had recently eaten at Marguery’s. This caught Brady’s imagination. Indeed, it became an obsession, and he delivered an ultimatum to Rector: ‘If you cannot put this dish on your menu, I shall go elsewhere.’
A serious business. Rector removed his son from Cornell University and sent him off to Paris as a gastronomical spy. The boy started at Marguery’s as a dishwasher, plongeur, lowest of the low, and worked his way up. After two years he reached the magic circle and the recipe, and set off home. As the boat sailed towards the dock, he could make out Diamond Jim on the quay, bellowing ‘Have you got the recipe?’
That night Diamond Jim ate nine helpings of Filet de sole Marguery. He went to the kitchen to congratulate the chef: ‘If you poured some of the sauce over a Turkish towel, I believe I could eat all of it.’
But what was the recipe? An American, James M. Andrews, pursued the story in the 1970s and happened to tell a friend, Nina Lobanov, about it. She in turn told her landlady, to amuse her one day when she was ill.
By extraordinary coincidence, this lady, Mrs Burmister, had visited the restaurant fifty years earlier in 1926, and charmed the recipe out of the maître-chef, Monsieur Manguin, who had ruled the kitchen for over thirty years. And she had kept it.
Serves 4
2 large fillets of sole, trimmed bones, heads, etc.
2–3 shallots, chopped
1 sprig of thyme
¼ bay leaf
2 sprigs of parsley
salt, white pepper
375 ml (12 fl oz) dry white wine
generous 1 kg (2½ lb) mussels
400 g (14 oz) unsalted French butter
6 egg yolks
GARNISH
500 g (1 lb) prawns, shelled
125 g (4 oz) winkles (optional)
Put bones, trimmings, etc., into a pan with shallots and herbs, seasoning and two-thirds of the wine. Add water barely to cover. Boil steadily for 20 minutes, skimming. Strain into a measuring jug.
Clean and open mussels in the usual way (see p. 239) with the remaining white wine. Discard shells. Keep mussels covered in a cool oven. Strain liquor into a measuring jug.
With 60 g (2 oz) butter, grease a flameproof non-stick or enamel pan and butter a piece of greaseproof paper, cut to fit on top. Flatten the fillets slightly, season and put into the pan in a single layer. Pour on enough of the sole and mussel stock almost to cover. Put on the paper, butter side down, and half-cook over a steady heat. Take the pan off the heat and pour off the liquor into a measuring jug. Keep the sole under its paper. It will continue to cook in its own warmth.
Boil the stock down hard to a syrupy concentration, about 300 ml (10 fl oz), but go by flavour. This takes the place of lemon and wine vinegar in what is virtually a hollandaise sauce. Strain about 150 ml (5 fl oz), through muslin this time, into a pan, off the heat. The stock should still be hot. Beat in the yolks.
Dice the remainder of the butter and beat to a cream in another pan over a low heat. Gradually beat the butter into the egg and stock mixture, to make a thick sauce. Keep raising the pan