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Sturgeon Cutlets
Cut the sturgeon into slices a quarter of an inch thick. Wash these, dry them in a cloth, flour them, and dip them into egg and seasoned bread-crumbs. Fry in hot fat until they are nicely browned on both sides, drain them, and serve with piquant or tomato sauce. Time to fry, ten to fifteen minutes.
A straightforward breaded fry, but the stated frying time is the thing to ignore. Quarter-inch crumbed slices are done long before ten minutes are up.
- Frying timeTwo to three minutes per side in fat at 350-375F is enough for slices this thin. Ten to fifteen minutes will leave the crumb dark and the fish chalky; sturgeon is lean and firm and turns dry and stringy once pushed much past 135-140F at the centre.
- Sourcing the fishWild sturgeon is protected across most of its range, and commercial sale of wild-caught fish is banned or tightly restricted in much of the world. Farmed sturgeon, sold as fillet or steak by caviar producers, is the practical source. Swordfish or a thick halibut fillet cut to the same thickness behaves similarly in the pan.
- Trim before slicingCut away the skin and any grey-brown fatty layer beneath it. That layer carries the strong, almost oily flavour older books complained of. Some period recipes also direct you to blanch or parboil sturgeon before cooking.
- "Egg and seasoned bread-crumbs"Beaten whole egg, loosened with a spoonful of water or oil, and dry fine crumbs seasoned with salt and pepper. Panko gives a lighter crust than the fine crumb of the period. Flour, egg, crumb, in that order, exactly as written.
- Fat and depthShallow-frying in about a quarter inch of neutral oil or clarified butter, turning once, matches the intent. Butter alone will brown too fast for the time needed.
- Piquant sauceGenerally a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, shallot, gherkin and capers, in the same family as sauce Robert rather than anything on a modern shelf. A tomato sauce is the easier of the two alternatives and suits the fish well.
- YieldAllow 5-6 oz of trimmed fish per person, which is two or three slices. A pound and a half serves four.
Sturgeon was once common enough in European rivers to be everyday market fish, and English books treat it much as they treat veal: dense, pale, close-grained flesh that takes to slicing into cutlets, crumbing and frying, rather than to the flaking-apart treatments given cod or whiting. That comparison may well be why the word "cutlet" appears here at all, and why the piquant sauce suggested is a meat sauce rather than a fish one. Cassell's was compiled at a point when sturgeon still turned up in British fishmongers, partly from home waters and partly imported; the royal claim on sturgeon caught in English waters, generally traced to a statute of Edward II, is often mentioned in period cookery writing as a curiosity rather than a practical obstacle. Overfishing and the caviar trade emptied the rivers within a century of this recipe being printed, and sturgeon sold for the table now comes largely from farms.