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Sturgeon, Croquettes Of
Sturgeon is a fish absolutely resembling veal, and when fresh is as white as very fine veal; when red, nothing can be done with it. If there is any returned of a very good white, but not sufficient to make a croquette, make it into small timbales. Cut the sturgeon into dice, and put them into a sauce similar to that mentioned in TIMBALES OF TURBOT (see TURBOT). After having cut enough fish into dice to make the croquettes, take some bechamel, and mushrooms cut into dice, to which add a small lump of butter, salt, etc., and put the fish into that sauce. Let them cool, and then dip them into crumbs of bread, as described for other croquettes. Fry them of a good colour, and serve some fried parsley in the centre of the dish.
This is a leftovers recipe, written for a kitchen that had cooked sturgeon sitting in the larder. It assumes you already know how to make croquettes and gives only what is particular to the fish, so the gaps need filling.
- Start with cooked fishThe dice are cut from sturgeon that has already been poached or baked and cooled — Cassell's is describing what to do with a returned dish. Poach a piece of fillet in salted water or court-bouillon until just opaque, cool it completely, then cut into 1/4-inch dice.
- The binding is everythingThe bechamel must be thick enough to hold a spoon upright and the mixture must be chilled solid, several hours or overnight, before shaping. A loose or barely cool mixture will burst in the fat, which is the only way this dish fails.
- Quantities, since none are givenFor about 1 lb of cooked diced sturgeon, work with roughly 1 cup of very thick bechamel and 4 oz of mushrooms cut to match the fish. That yields eight to ten croquettes, enough for four as a first course.
- Egg wash"Dip them into crumbs of bread" is shorthand for flour, beaten egg, then dry crumbs. Crumbs alone will not adhere. A second pass through egg and crumbs is worth the trouble on a soft filling like this.
- FryingDeep fat at 350-375F, two to three minutes, until the crust is an even brown. The interior is already cooked; you are only setting the coating and heating the centre.
- "When red, nothing can be done with it"Most likely a freshness judgement rather than a species distinction, though the book does not say which; sturgeon flesh darkens and coarsens as it ages. Modern farmed sturgeon should be pale ivory and smell clean; anything ruddy or ammoniac goes in the bin.
- SourcingWild sturgeon are protected under CITES and most wild fisheries are closed. Buy farmed sturgeon fillet, sold widely by caviar producers; firm white fish such as halibut or monkfish behaves similarly in croquettes if sturgeon is not to be had.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs thoroughly, then drop them into the fat for a few seconds only, after the croquettes are out and the fat has settled. Wet parsley spits violently and burns almost immediately.
- The timbale variationIf there is too little fish for croquettes, the same diced sturgeon in sauce goes into small moulds instead of the fryer. The book gives no method here; the cross-reference to turbot is where the sauce for it lives, and moulded timbales are conventionally baked in a water bath.
Cassell's opens by insisting sturgeon "absolutely resembl[es] veal," and that comparison did a lot of work in Victorian kitchens: the flesh is dense, close-grained and pale, and it was routinely cooked in ways reserved for meat rather than fish — larded, roasted, cut into cutlets. In Britain the sturgeon was traditionally a royal fish, claimed for the Crown when caught in coastal waters, which lent it a prestige out of proportion to how often anyone actually ate it. The recipe's real subject, though, is thrift. A dictionary of cookery aimed at large households needed an answer for the handsome fish that came back from the dining room half eaten, and the croquette — diced, bound in bechamel, crumbed and fried — was the standard answer for almost any cooked flesh in the late nineteenth-century repertoire. That the entry begins by telling you when not to bother says something about larders without reliable refrigeration.