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Sturgeon, Fresh, Grilled
Cut the sturgeon into slices an inch thick. Dry these and dip them into egg and seasoned bread-crumbs, and fasten them in papers saturated with butter, or simply brush them over with salad-oil, and sprinkle salt and pepper upon them. Broil them over a clear fire until they are sufficiently cooked on both sides. Serve with melted butter, oyster, or anchovy sauce, or with piquant sauce to which a few drops of essence of anchovy and a small piece of butter have been added. Time to grill, about fifteen minutes, but varying with the size and age of the fish.
A straightforward grill, but two things need translating: the paper wrapping and the timing, which is roughly double what a one-inch slice of sturgeon wants.
- Sourcing the fishWild sturgeon is protected across most of its range and cannot legally be bought in much of the world. Farmed sturgeon, sold as steaks or fillets by caviar producers, is widely available and is what this recipe now means.
- TimeFifteen minutes will dry out an inch-thick slice. Sturgeon is dense and lean, closer to veal than to cod in texture; 4 to 5 minutes a side under a hot broiler or over coals is usually enough, to an internal temperature of about 145F. It firms up noticeably when done and turns woolly soon after.
- "Saturated with butter"The fish is wrapped in paper heavily brushed with butter, the same principle as cooking en papillote: parchment or a similar stout paper, buttered and folded round the fish so the crumb coating steams rather than scorches. Over a modern gas grill the paper is liable to catch; use foil, or take the second option in the recipe and simply oil the slices.
- Salad-oilIn Victorian usage this generally means olive oil. Any neutral oil or a light olive oil serves.
- Melted butterNot simply butter melted in a pan. In nineteenth-century English kitchens "melted butter" is a flour-thickened butter sauce, the standard fish accompaniment of the period. Modern cooks will get a better result from a beurre blanc or plain drawn butter with lemon.
- Essence of anchovyA bottled concentrate, once a pantry staple. Anchovy paste, thinned with a little water, is the direct substitute; a mashed salted anchovy fillet does the same job.
- Piquant sauceSauce piquante: a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, shallots and chopped gherkins or capers. The book assumes you have one to hand.
- YieldAn inch-thick slice of about 6 to 8 oz is one serving. Allow that per person and cook the slices in a single layer so they colour rather than steam.
Sturgeon was once far more plentiful in European rivers than it is today, and in England it carried the odd distinction of being a royal fish: by long-standing prerogative, sturgeon taken in English waters or cast ashore belonged to the Crown, a rule generally traced to a statute of Edward II. Cassell's treats it as ordinary flesh to be crumbed and broiled, which tells you how the Victorians thought of it: firm, meaty, faintly veal-like, and best handled with the strong bottled sauces of the period rather than delicately. The wrapping in buttered paper echoes French en papillote practice, though cooking fish in buttered paper was long established in English kitchens too, and it is used here for a practical reason rather than a decorative one, since a lean fish on an open grid dries fast. Overfishing and the caviar trade eventually emptied the rivers, and the fish that was once listed alongside the cod and the mackerel is now farmed, expensive and, in the wild, protected almost everywhere.