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Sturgeon, Boiled
Cut the fish into thin slices like veal cutlets, rub them over with a little butter and give a sprinkling of pepper. Serve very hot with lemon garnish. Take great care to cut off the skin before the fish is boiled, as the oil in the skin if burnt imparts a very rank flavour.
The entry is really a set of handling notes rather than a full method — it assumes you already know how to poach a firm fish. The one instruction that matters is the first thing to do and the last thing mentioned.
- Skin it firstSturgeon skin is thick, tough and heavily oiled, and that oil turns rank in the cooking water, as the book warns. Strip the skin before boiling, and trim the grey fat layer beneath it as well, which also carries a strong flavour.
- Slices "like veal cutlets"That means slices cut across the fish rather than fillets. Sturgeon has a dense, close-grained flesh that holds its shape, which is likely why the comparison to veal is made.
- Boiled means poachedA genuine rolling boil shreds the outside before the middle is done. Bring salted water or a court-bouillon to a bare shiver, slide the slices in, and hold it there.
- TimeThin slices need only a few minutes. The flesh should be just opaque and still moist; sturgeon dries into something genuinely rubbery if pushed.
- The butter and pepperRubbing butter over the slices reads as a finishing step after draining rather than a treatment before cooking, though the book's wording is compressed and does not actually say.
- SourcingEvery sturgeon species is CITES-listed and wild capture is restricted or prohibited across most of its former range. Farmed sturgeon, largely from caviar production, is what is legally sold today and is perfectly good for this.
- Yield and servingAllow about 6 oz of trimmed fish per person. Lemon is the book's garnish; a plain melted butter, a caper sauce or a horseradish cream all suit the meaty texture better than a delicate fish sauce would.
Sturgeon appears in English cookery books far more often than its rarity today would suggest. It was a royal fish — by long-standing custom any sturgeon taken in English waters or cast ashore belonged to the Crown — and the Thames, Severn and Scottish rivers all yielded them into the nineteenth century. The entry treats it as a butcher's cut rather than a fish, comparing the slices to veal cutlets: firm, pale, close-grained flesh. The warning about the skin is the sort of detail that only comes from experience, and it is the reason the entry survives being so thin on method. Overfishing and river damming collapsed the wild populations across the twentieth century, and the fish that reaches kitchens now is almost entirely a by-product of caviar farming.