If boiled, they must be served with great care to look perfectly white, and should be much covered with parsley.
If fried, dip them in egg, and cover them with fine crumbs of bread. Set on a fryingpan that is just large enough, and put into it a large quantity of fresh lard or dripping; boil it, and immediately slip the fish into it. Do them of a fine brown. When enough, take them out carefully, and lay them upon a dish turned under side uppermost, and placed slantingly before the fire to drain off the fat. If you wish them to be particularly nice, lay them on clean cap paper, and let lie some minutes.
Observe, that fish never looks well if not fried in plenty of fat, and that boiling hot, before it be put into it. The dripping may serve again with a little fresh. Take care the fat does not become black. Butter makes every thing black that is fried in it. The soals should just fit the inside of the dish, and a fringe of curled parsley garnish the edge completely, which looks beautifully.
Soals that have been fried, eat good cold with oil, vinegar, salt, and mustard. Note. Fine oil gives the finest colour, but is expensive.
Stewed Soals, and Carp,
Are to be done like lampreys.
Soals, in the Portuguese way.
Take one large or two lesser; if the former, cut the fish in two; if they are small, they need only be split. The bones being taken out, put the fish into a pan, with a bit of butter and some lemonjuice: give it a fry; then lay the fish on a dish, and spread a forcemeat over each piece, and roll it round, fastening the roll with a few small skewers. Lay the rolls into a small earthen pan; beat an egg and wet them, then strew crumbs over, and put the remainder of the egg, with a little meat gravy, a spoonful of caper liquor, an anchovy chopped fine, and some parsley chopped, into the bottom of the pan; cover it close, and bake, until the fish be done enough, in a slow oven. Then place the rolls in the dish for serving; cover it to keep it hot until the gravy baked be skimmed: if not enough, a little fresh, flavoured as above, must be prepared and added to it.
The stuffing to be made as on the following page.