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STURGEON, STEWED (another way.)
Dip the slices of fish in vinegar, then dry them, dredge them with flour, and broil or fry them. Next lay them in a stewpan with some good broth, and let them stew gently till quite tender; thicken with butter or cream, half a glassful of wine, and a spoonful of soy, ketchup, or Harvey's sauce; throw capers over the top, and serve up garnished with slices of lemon.
A short Victorian entry that assumes you know what a stewpan is and how long fish takes. The critical adjustment is time: sturgeon is firm and meaty, but it is still fish, and "stew gently till quite tender" will turn it to cotton wool if taken literally.
- Sourcing the fishEvery wild sturgeon species is now restricted under CITES, and Atlantic and lake sturgeon are protected outright in much of their range. Buy farmed sturgeon, which is raised commercially in the US, France and Italy and sold as thick white steaks; farmed white sturgeon is the usual substitute. Swordfish or a thick halibut steak behaves similarly in the pan if sturgeon is unavailable.
- Cooking timeSturgeon steaks 1 inch thick need roughly 4 to 6 minutes of searing or broiling, then no more than 6 to 8 minutes gently simmering in the broth. The nineteenth-century instruction to stew until tender may reflect larger, coarser wild fish, sometimes sold salted; farmed sturgeon does not need it.
- The vinegar dipThe vinegar was probably meant to counter the muddy, oily character of river sturgeon and to firm the surface. With farmed fish it is optional, but it does help the flour coating adhere. Dry the slices thoroughly or they will steam rather than brown.
- StewpanA stewpan here is a wide, shallow, lidded saucepan, not a covered baking dish. A sauté pan or braiser with a lid is the right vessel; the slices should sit in a single layer with the broth coming halfway up.
- Ketchup"Ketchup" in this book means mushroom or walnut ketchup, thin, dark and salty, not the tomato product. Harvey's sauce was a commercial anchovy-and-soy condiment of the same family. Worcestershire sauce is the closest thing on a modern shelf; use about a tablespoon.
- Half a glassful of wineA wine glass of the period held roughly 2 fl oz, so half a glass is about 2 tablespoons — call it 1 fl oz. Sherry or Madeira suits the sauce better than table wine.
- ThickeningWork equal parts soft butter and flour into a paste and whisk it into the simmering broth in small pieces, or reduce the broth and finish with a few tablespoons of cream. Add the wine and the soy or Worcestershire at the end so their aromatics survive.
- YieldFigure 6 to 8 oz of fish per person. The quantities of broth are left to the cook: about 1 cup of well-flavoured fish or veal stock will sauce four steaks. Rinse the capers if they are salt-packed, since the soy and ketchup already carry plenty of salt.
Sturgeon appears in English cookery books far more often than its scarcity today would suggest. The fish was once present in the Thames, the Severn and the great rivers of the Atlantic seaboard, and in England it carried the odd distinction of being a royal fish, the Crown's by prerogative when caught in coastal waters — a rule generally traced to a medieval statute and still cited in the nineteenth century. Cooks treated it as a meat rather than a delicate fish: it was broiled, larded, stewed in gravy and dressed with the same dark, salty bottled sauces that went on beefsteak, which is exactly what this entry does with its soy, ketchup and Harvey's. The book gives several methods in sequence, this being "another way." Overfishing for flesh and for caviar collapsed the wild stocks across Europe and North America, and the sturgeon a modern cook buys is almost always farmed.