THE RECIPE: Classic Sole Meunière
My friend Ben is one of those people who can cook anything without breaking a sweat. I love him for that. I also hate him for it. He's an opera director, but in the off-hours, he's usually cooking, and he's usually cooking something from the canon of French classics. He cooks the kind of dishes that come with not only a formal title, but also a formal title in italics. The phone rings at eight on a Tuesday night, just as we're starting to scramble some eggs for dinner. It's Ben, calling to invite us over for coq au vin, steak frites, or truite amandine, his tone so casual that you'd think he was talking about opening a can of soup.
"There was a special on trout at the store today," he says. "I'm making a Martini, and Bonnie is setting the table. Why don't you come over?"
We go over. Ben is married to a woman who went to college with my husband, and our apartments are in the same neighborhood. Bonnie is a percussionist and cooking is not her strong suit, but Ben has them amply covered. On this particular evening, he presents us with a whole trout each, crisp-skinned, dressed in browned butter, sliced almonds, and parsley. And in case a sautéed whole trout is not enough to make you giddy on a weeknight, this specimen is extra-fancy: sitting upright on the plate, folded in half using a classical technique so that its tail pokes jauntily through its mouth. Ben has even warmed the plates. He not only has chops; he has class.
Ben says that he learned everything he knows about cooking from a couple of books by Jacques Pépin, but what matters most to me is that he knows it at all. His ease at the stove is enviable. With the exception of a couple of culinary school graduates, I don't know anyone else who has the same comfortable mastery of the classics, of method and technique. Most of us, I think, are dabblers: We know how to make this, and we know how to make that. Our knowledge is broad, but not always so deep. Most of the time, that's fine. When you think about it, few of us have any real need to be able to flip a trout's tail through its mouth. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be kind of fantastic to try. Or that it wouldn't be useful, at the very least, to know how to sauté a proper piece of fish and make a pan sauce to go with it.
I know I would like to.
I guess I could have asked Ben to walk me through his truite amandine, but I wanted to try to prepare it on my own. The truth is, I want to make a classic sole meunière. I like trout, but truite amandine is essentially a variation on sole meunière: the same basic concept, but with a different fish, plus almonds (and tail acrobatics, if you're Ben). If I'm out to master a single French fish dish, I might as well start at the foundation. Anyway, I love sole meunière. It was old school before we called anything old school. It's about as fresh-faced as the Queen of England, yet it cannot be improved upon. It also involves browned butter. There's a lot to love about it.
I'm sure I had sole meunière as a kid. My father loved sole, and I probably had a bite from his plate before I even knew what it was. But what I consider my first taste of sole meunière, the one I remember, was a couple of years ago in Paris, with my husband, at a restaurant called Le Bistro Paul Bert. The fish came to the table whole, head-on, in a sheer sauce of browned butter and lemon juice and chopped parsley, with a half-dozen peeled potatoes standing by. All I could think of, eating it, was how perfect it was. There was the sweet, creamy meat, the nutty butter, and the grassy parsley. And then there was the lemon, kicking its way, sharp and smart, through the richness. Feeling high on the whole night, we proceeded to eat a Paris-Brest pastry the size of a wheel on a child's bicycle before heading out to the subway in the contented stupor of two people on vacation who have consumed a lot of butterfat and alcohol and have consequently forgotten that the apartment they've rented for the week reeks, absolutely reeks, of mildew. I fell hard for that sole meunière.
The beauty—and the curse—of sole meunière is its simplicity. This means that there is not a lot to mess up, but there's also not a lot of room to hide mistakes. When a fish is cooked in the meunière style (meunière is French for "miller's wife"), it gets nothing more than a dredging in flour, a brief turn in a hot skillet, and then a dousing with a pan sauce of butter and lemon and parsley. You must work quickly, carefully, and decisively. It sounds daunting, and I will tell you right now that the first time you try it, you may wish you had three arms. But it will turn out well anyway, despite your flailing, and you will feel as if you can do (and cook) anything.
Before I made my first go, I looked up about a dozen recipes for reference, and the real key, what matters most, isn't so much the ingredient quantities. It's the technique. To make a great sole meunière, you need to remember to measure your ingredients ahead of time (this dish comes together quickly); once the fish is in the pan, don't disturb it for at least a minute. If you leave the fish alone, it will form a nice, golden crust. The first time you try it, you might want to buy a couple of extra fillets so that you can get the hang of cooking them without worrying about messing up anyone's dinner. You might also want to have extra butter on hand, in case yours accidentally slips, as mine did, from browned to blackened. It's not that sole meunière is hard—it's just something that takes a little trial and error. Keep at it. It's worth it.
Of course, now that I've gone on and on like this, you'll probably nail it, and then you'll wonder what I was so worked up about. That's all right. I just hope, should that happen, that you'll channel your inner Ben and call up some friends to come over.
THE RECIPE: Classic Sole Meunière