Home › The Principles of Cookery › STURGEON, BAKED (another way)
STURGEON, BAKED (another way)
Split the sturgeon. Make a marinade either with wine or vinegar, and pour it into a vessel large enough to contain the fish, which cover with buttered paper to prevent its getting too high a colour. Baste frequently with the marinade. When the sturgeon is done, have the sauce made as in the recipe STURGEON, ROASTED, and use it to mask the fish. Put the marinade in the dish with the sturgeon, but you may lay skewers across the dish to prevent the fish from touching the liquid. If the fish is boiled in the liquid it will be thready, and not so palatable.
This is the second of Cassell's sturgeon methods and it assumes you have already read the roasted version for the sauce. The instructions are more a set of cautions than a procedure, so the numbers below are the ones the original leaves out.
- The hinge: bake, do not poachThe whole point of the skewers laid across the dish is to keep the fish above the marinade rather than in it. Sturgeon has a coarse, muscular flake, and stewing it in acidic liquid makes it separate into the "thready" strands the recipe warns of. Keep it in vapour and baste from above.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Treat this as a moderate oven, 350F, and lower to 325F if the marinade begins to boil hard rather than steam.
- Timing and donenessSturgeon is dense and firm-fleshed, closer to veal than to cod in the way it behaves. The original gives no timing at all; as a rough starting point reckon something like 10 minutes per inch of thickness in a moderate oven, checking early, and take it to about 145F internal, when it is still firm and slightly resilient rather than flaking apart.
- Buttered paperButtered parchment, cut to the shape of the fish and laid directly on it. Foil works but seals too well and steams the surface; the paper is there to hold back colour while still letting moisture escape.
- The marinadeNo proportions are given. A workable version is two parts dry white wine to one part water with sliced onion, bay, peppercorns and a little oil, enough to cover the bottom of the dish by half an inch. If you use the vinegar option, cut it at least half with water or wine, or the acid will overwhelm the fish.
- "Mask the fish"Victorian usage: coat the fish evenly with the sauce so the flesh is hidden, rather than serving the sauce separately.
- SourcingWild sturgeon is protected across most of its range and should not be bought. Farmed sturgeon, mostly Siberian or white sturgeon raised for caviar, is sold legally and is what this recipe now means; a thick fillet or a centre-cut steak stands in for the split fish.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities or number of diners at all. Sturgeon is rich and filling, so allow about 6 oz per person rather than the 8 oz you might give to a leaner fish.
Sturgeon carried more prestige in Victorian England than its flavour alone would explain. Under a royal prerogative generally traced to the medieval period, sturgeon taken in English waters was a "royal fish" belonging to the Crown, and the ceremony of offering one to the monarch persisted well into the nineteenth century. Cassell's gives the fish several entries, which tells you it was still a plausible purchase from a good fishmonger when the Dictionary was compiled in the 1870s, before overfishing and the caviar trade collapsed the populations of Europe and North America. The insistence on baking rather than boiling reflects a genuine culinary problem the Victorians met head-on: sturgeon's dense connective tissue often earned it comparisons with veal or even beef, and this recipe itself warns that wet, prolonged cooking reduced it to strings.