Sole Meunière
The dish that made Julia Child fall in love with France: sole floured and fried in butter, finished with foaming beurre noisette, lemon and parsley. Four ingredients, eight minutes, and no room to hide.
Photograph credit: 700g Dover sole "à la meuniere" - English's of Brighton 2025-07-29 by Andy Li · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons
What to Put on the Table With Sole Meunière
- Steamed new potatoes with parsley
- A crisp Chablis or Muscadet
- Buttered green beans or wilted spinach
Sides from the same cuisine on this site: Provençal Ratatouille, French Baguette, Fougasse.
Photograph credit: Sole meunière - Massachusetts by Daderot · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons
Making Sole Meunière, Step by Step
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Pat the sole bone dry on both sides and season with salt and white pepper 5 minutes before cooking.
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Season the flour, then dredge each fish, pressing lightly and shaking off every loose speck — excess flour burns in the pan.
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Heat the clarified butter in a large frying pan over medium-high heat until it shimmers.
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Lay in the fish, presentation side down, and cook undisturbed for 4 minutes until deep gold. Turn once with two spatulas and cook 3 minutes more.
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Lift onto warmed plates. Wipe the pan clean of any burnt flour.
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Add the fresh butter to the pan over medium heat and swirl until it foams, then subsides, and the milk solids turn hazelnut brown and smell of toasted nuts, about 90 seconds.
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Take off the heat, add the lemon juice — it will spit — then the parsley, and pour immediately over the fish. Serve with the lemon wedges.
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Worth Knowing Before You Cook
Ask the fishmonger to skin and trim the sole. It is a fiddly job and they will do it in thirty seconds.
Beurre noisette goes from perfect to burnt in about fifteen seconds. Have the lemon juice already measured and standing by.
Lemon sole, plaice or trout fillets all work; reduce the cooking time to 2 minutes a side for fillets.
Leftovers
This is a dish to cook and eat within minutes. Leftovers are not worth keeping.
What's in a Serving
No nutrition figures are given for this recipe: they cannot be worked out reliably from its ingredient list (some ingredient lines cannot be read). Why some recipes have none.
Your notes on this recipe
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Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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