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STURGEON, BLANQUETTE OF (a la Paysanne)
When you have some roasted sturgeon returned, keep it to make a blanquette. Pare nicely some round pieces the size of half a crown, and put them into a sauce a blanquette, to which add a little chopped parsley and the juice of a lemon. This blanquette is sent to table like all others in a vol-au-vent, or a casserole, with rice, etc.
A thrift dish rather than a set piece: cold roast sturgeon cut into coins and warmed through in a white sauce. Everything depends on the sauce and on not cooking the fish a second time.
- The hinge: never let the sauce boilA sauce à la blanquette is a white sauce of the velouté type, usually finished with a liaison of egg yolk and cream. Once yolks go in, hold the pan below a simmer -- yolk liaisons set at roughly 180F -- because a boil scrambles the yolk and the sauce breaks into grains.
- Add the lemon last, off the heatAcid added to a hot cream-and-yolk sauce encourages curdling. Stir in the juice and the parsley after the pan is off the flame, then taste for salt.
- "The size of half a crown"The coin was about 1 1/4 inches across. Cut the fish into rounds or neat squares of roughly that width and a good 1/4 inch thick so they hold together in the sauce.
- The fish is already cookedThis is reheating, not cooking. Slip the pieces into the warm sauce and give them two or three minutes to come through. Sturgeon is dense and meaty but it will still go dry and stringy if held hot for long.
- "A casserole" here is not a bakeIn this period a casserole at table often meant a moulded case of dressed rice, baked or fried firm and filled at the last moment, the rice equivalent of a vol-au-vent. Reading it as a modern covered baking dish loses the point of "with rice, etc."
- Sourcing sturgeonWild sturgeon of most species are now protected and trade in them is restricted; the fish sold today is farmed, and farmed sturgeon meat is widely available fresh or frozen. Any firm, meaty white fish left over from roasting will take the same treatment.
- QuantityThe original assumes whatever came back from the dining room. As a guide, about 1 lb of cooked fish to 1 1/2 cups of finished sauce serves four in vol-au-vent cases.
Blanquette takes its name from the whiteness of the sauce, an egg-and-cream-finished velouté that is never allowed to colour, and the term is generally traced to French veal cookery before being applied to poultry, fish and anything else that suited a pale sauce. The recipe's opening assumption is that a large roast fish came to table once whole and reappeared pared into neat rounds under a white sauce. Sturgeon appeared in nineteenth-century British and French kitchens as a firm, almost butcher's-meat fish, frequently roasted or braised in cuts like a joint, which is exactly why leftovers were substantial enough to warrant their own recipe. In Britain it also carried the odd distinction of being a royal fish, technically claimable by the Crown when caught in home waters.