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To Bake Sturgeon
The skin must be well washed. Place in a pan and bake for one hour. Place it on a dish, make several incisions with a sharp knife, then make a stuffing of bread crumbs, meat, onions, salt, pepper, parsley and thyme, all mixed well together. Stuff the holes well with these ingredients and place the remainder around the fish; return to the oven and bake
A bare-bones nineteenth-century method that assumes a large whole fish, a hot brick oven and a cook who already knows what stuffing should look like. Two things need attention before anything else: the total baking time and the source of the fish.
- The timing is the problemAn hour of baking followed by a second stint in the oven will overcook a modest piece of sturgeon. The original assumed a very large piece, likely several pounds of thick steak or a whole small fish. Modern farmed sturgeon fillet or steak is usually taken off at an internal 135-140F, though official guidance for fish is 145F; as a rough rule, allow about 10 minutes per inch of thickness at 375F.
- No temperature is givenThe book expects you to know. For a pan of fish of this kind, treat it as a moderate oven, 350-375F. Nothing here wants a fierce heat.
- Sourcing the fishWild sturgeon are protected across most of their range and international trade is controlled under CITES; several species may not be taken at all. Buy farmed sturgeon from a reputable supplier. Farmed fish is legal, widely available and has the same dense, meaty texture the recipe is built around.
- That skinSturgeon skin is armoured with bony scutes rather than scales, which may be why the instruction is to wash it rather than scale it. Farmed fish today is often sold already skinned; if not, the skin is tough and best removed after cooking.
- "Meat" in the stuffingRead this as cooked meat, finely minced and bound with the crumbs; cooked leftovers or chopped salt pork would both suit. Raw ground meat added to a fish already half-baked will not reach a safe temperature in the short time the fish needs.
- Stuffing proportionsFor a 3 lb piece, about 2 cups fresh breadcrumbs, 1 cup minced cooked meat, one small onion softened in butter, a good handful of parsley, a teaspoon of thyme leaves, salt and pepper. Moisten with stock or melted butter until it just holds together, or it will bake to sand.
- The incisionsCut pockets into the flesh only, not through to the pan, and pack them before the second bake. The point is to season the interior of a very thick, close-grained fish that surface seasoning will never reach.
- YieldSturgeon is rich. Figure 5-6 oz of fish per person plus the stuffing, so a 3 lb piece serves eight comfortably.
Sturgeon was once a common enough American market fish to warrant a plain, unfussy recipe like this one. Nineteenth-century catches from the Hudson, the Delaware and the Great Lakes were large enough that smoked sturgeon was sold cheaply in East Coast cities and sometimes went by the nickname "Albany beef" — a reference to its dense, almost butcher's-meat texture. That texture is why the recipe treats the fish like a roast: it is stuffed, slashed, and surrounded with dressing exactly as a joint of meat or a fowl would be. The stocks collapsed under heavy fishing and dam-building through the late 1800s and early 1900s. Nearly all sturgeon sold now is farmed, and the species is better known for its roe than for baking whole.