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Sturgeon, Fried
Cut the fish into slices, and fry in the usual manner; then pour off the fat, and put a little flour and boiling water into the pan. Pour this into a stewpan, and add to it some sweet herbs and an onion, and season with pepper and salt. Let the fish stew till quite tender; then strain the sauce, and serve it poured round the fish, adding first a little lemon-juice.
A two-stage method: the slices are browned, then finished in a quick pan gravy built from the frying fat. The Victorian instruction to "stew till quite tender" is the part to ignore most firmly.
- The hinge: do not stew it longSturgeon is dense and often compared to veal, which encouraged nineteenth-century cooks to treat it like braising meat. It is still fish, and slices an inch thick need roughly 8-10 minutes at a bare simmer, to an internal 140F. Pushed further it turns dry and stringy rather than tender.
- "Fry in the usual manner"The recipe assumes the reader already knows the book's ordinary frying method for fish slices: flour them and colour them in hot fat. Note that the flour which thickens the sauce is the flour added to the pan afterwards, not a coating.
- The saucePour off all but a spoonful of fat, stir in flour, and add boiling water off the heat, whisking. The recipe specifies only "a little" of each and gives no measurements. Water was the period default; stock, or a dry white wine and water, gives a sauce worth straining.
- Sweet herbsThe standard Victorian bundle is parsley, thyme and a bay leaf, sometimes with marjoram. A few stalks tied together, removed with the straining, is the intent.
- Sourcing the fishAll sturgeon species are CITES-listed and international trade in them is tightly controlled; a few regulated wild fisheries survive in some jurisdictions, but farmed sturgeon, sold as fillets or steaks, is the realistic source. Swordfish or a thick halibut steak behaves similarly in this method.
- Lemon at the endThe juice goes in after straining and off the heat. Added earlier it dulls, and acid in the simmering liquid tightens the flesh.
- YieldTwo pounds of sturgeon in three or four thick slices serves four, with potatoes or plain boiled rice to take the sauce.
Sturgeon occupied an odd position in British cookery: a royal fish by ancient custom, meaning stranded or caught specimens in English waters belonged to the Crown, yet by the late nineteenth century much of what reached the kitchen seems to have been imported, salted, or pickled from Russian and North American fisheries. Cooks of the period often described its flesh as meat-like, and recipes of the kind found in Cassell's and its contemporaries appear to have treated it much as one would veal — larded, roasted or stewed — which may explain the braising instruction here and the savoury onion-and-herb gravy rather than a fish sauce. The great sturgeon fisheries of the Hudson, the Delaware and the Caspian were still commercially enormous when this dictionary was compiled; within a few decades overfishing for flesh and roe had collapsed them, and a fish once familiar to Victorian households became one of the most strictly protected in the world.