Home › The Principles of Cookery › STURGEON, ROASTED (another way)
STURGEON, ROASTED (another way)
Take a middle piece of sturgeon; split it, and dress it as in preceding recipe; make a marinade with white wine, with which baste the fish. Next take some of the marinade and reduce it with four large spoonfuls of good Spanish sauce. When the sauce is of a good consistency, put in it about half a pound of fresh butter kneaded with a little flour, salt, cayenne pepper, the juice of a lemon, and a spoonful of essence of anchovies. If you have no Spanish sauce, make a little thickening with flour and butter, and moisten with the marinade, adding a little glaze.
A short entry that assumes you have already read the preceding sturgeon recipe and that a pot of espagnole is sitting on the stove. Neither assumption holds now, so most of the work is in reconstructing the sauce and in sourcing the fish.
- Sourcing the fishAll sturgeon species are CITES-listed and wild-caught sturgeon is not legally sold in most markets. Farmed white sturgeon and Siberian sturgeon are sold as steaks and loin sections and are what this recipe now means; buy from a supplier who can name the farm.
- "A middle piece"The thick central section of the fish, between the head end and the tail, cut as a single roasting joint. A 2-3 lb boneless loin section is the modern equivalent, and it feeds six to eight.
- "Dress it as in preceding recipe"The instruction points back to an earlier sturgeon entry not reproduced here, so the preparation has to be inferred. Sturgeon is lean and firm enough to behave like veal, which is why period cooks larded or barded it; bacon or pancetta does that job.
- Oven and donenessThe recipe specifies no temperature. A moderate oven, around 375-400F, suits a loin section. Sturgeon is dense and dries past about 140F, so it is often pulled at 130-135F internal, though that is below the 145F usually recommended for fish; cook to 145F if you want the conventional safe margin.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole: a brown roux moistened with brown veal stock and mirepoix, simmered and skimmed for hours. "Four large spoonfuls" means roughly 4-6 tablespoons of finished sauce. The alternative given at the end -- flour-and-butter thickening loosened with the marinade and lifted with glaze -- is the practical route.
- GlazeMeat glaze, or glace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A teaspoon is enough to give body and depth to a small sauce; commercial glace or a reduced demi-glace works.
- The half-pound of butterHalf a pound of flour-kneaded butter finishing four spoonfuls of sauce is a kitchen-scale quantity from a period that cooked for large tables. For a domestic version, use 2-3 tablespoons of beurre manié whisked in off the boil, adding more only if the sauce is thin.
- Essence of anchoviesA commercial anchovy extract, salty and sharp. Anchovy paste or a splash of colatura gives the same effect; a scant teaspoon is plenty, and hold the salt until after it goes in.
- The marinadeWhite wine with aromatics, used both to baste and as the liquid base of the sauce. Since it has been in contact with raw fish, it must go into the pan and reduce properly rather than being stirred in at the end.
Sturgeon carried an authority in Britain out of proportion to how often anyone ate it: under a statute generally traced to the reign of Edward II, sturgeon caught in English waters were reckoned among the "fishes royal" and belonged in principle to the Crown, a prerogative still occasionally invoked in the nineteenth century when a specimen turned up in the Thames or the Severn. Cassell's treats it as a meat rather than a fish, finishing it with espagnole, anchovy and meat glaze -- the whole apparatus of a braised veal dish -- which reflects the firm, close grain of the flesh. The abundance the book takes for granted is gone: overfishing and the caviar trade collapsed the wild populations across the twentieth century, and the sturgeon on sale today is almost entirely farmed.