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STURGEON, BOILED (M. Ude's way)
Boil the sturgeon in salt and water. When it is done, drain, and mask or cover it with the following sauce. Reduce in a small stewpan four spoonfuls of elder vinegar. When it is half reduced, put in six spoonfuls of veloute, or rather a quantity proportionate to the size of the fish, and half a spoonful of cavice; thicken the sauce with three yolks of eggs, and add a quarter of a pound of butter and some salt and pepper. Work this sauce well; drain the fish, and cover it with the sauce. In order to keep it thick and white, mix with it a little thick cream.
A Regency-era chef's method, condensed into a dictionary entry: poached sturgeon under a rich velouté finished with egg yolks and butter. Two of the four sauce ingredients no longer exist under those names, and the sauce is the whole point of the dish.
- The hinge: the sauce must not boilOnce the three yolks go in, the sauce is a liaison and will curdle above roughly 180F. Work it off direct heat, whisking, and add the butter in pieces so it emulsifies rather than splits. The cream at the end is insurance as much as colour.
- CaviceA bottled fish sauce or pickle-liquor of the period, usually taken to be connected with caveach (spiced pickled fish, itself from escabeche); its exact composition is not recorded and probably varied. Nothing sold today matches it; a scant teaspoon of anchovy paste or a dash of Worcestershire gives a comparable salty, fermented lift. Half a spoonful is a seasoning, not a flavour base.
- Elder vinegarWhite wine vinegar infused with elderflowers, common in English larders through the nineteenth century and still easy to make or buy. Plain white wine vinegar with a strip of lemon peel is the nearest ordinary substitute. Use elderflower only, never the stems, leaves or bark, which are toxic.
- SpoonfulsUde wrote before standardised measures. Read these as tablespoons: about 1/4 cup of vinegar reduced to 2 tablespoons, and about 6 tablespoons of velouté, scaled up for a larger fish.
- VeloutéVelouté -- A white roux slackened with fish or veal stock and simmered until it coats a spoon. Make it in advance; the recipe assumes a pot of it already standing ready, as it would have been in a large professional kitchen.
- Poaching the fish"Boil in salt and water" means a bare simmer in salted water or court bouillon, not a rolling boil. Sturgeon is dense and meaty and behaves more like veal than like cod; allow roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness. Cooks aiming for succulence often pull it at an internal 130-135F, though standard food-safety guidance for fish is 145F.
- Sourcing the fishWild sturgeon is protected or restricted across most of its range and its trade is controlled internationally. Farmed sturgeon, largely from aquaculture in Europe, North America and China, is legal, available and what this recipe should be made with.
- YieldThe sauce as written, about 6 tablespoons of velouté with 4 oz butter and three yolks, is roughly enough to mask a couple of pounds of fish. Scale the sauce to the fish rather than the other way round, as the text advises.
"M. Ude" is Louis Eustache Ude, the French chef who cooked for the Earl of Sefton and later ran the kitchens at Crockford's gaming club in London, and whose The French Cook (1813) went through many English editions. Cassell's compilers, working decades later, treated him as an authority worth quoting by name, which is why his method survives here in his own compressed professional shorthand, assuming the reader already keeps velouté and bottled cavice to hand. Sturgeon carried particular weight in a British cookbook: it is a royal fish, and by long custom any taken in English waters or cast ashore belongs to the Crown, so it reached most tables rarely and by favour. Its firm, pale, almost butcher's-meat flesh invited exactly this treatment, a heavy egg-and-butter sauce of the kind the French kitchen reserved for veal.