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Smoked Sturgeon
Put fish in a pint of boiling water and cook fifteen minutes, and then take out, and add a little pepper to the water, and salt if needed, a piece of butter, and thicken with a little flour. Pour sauce over the fish and serve hot.
— Mrs. Jacob Hollenbeck
This is a village receipt in the strictest sense: it assumes you have a slab of hard-smoked sturgeon in the pantry and know roughly how much you want to eat. Almost everything that needs adjusting comes from the fact that the smoked fish sold today is a different product from the one Mrs. Hollenbeck had.
- The hinge: modern smoked sturgeon is already cookedHot-smoked sturgeon sold today is fully cooked and ready to eat; fifteen minutes at a boil turns it into dry threads. The long boil suggests a firmer, saltier cure than what is sold now, with the water serving to soften the fish and draw out salt — though the receipt itself specifies nothing about the cure, and its "salt if needed" leaves room for fish that was not very briny. With a modern piece, warming it through in the liquid for two or three minutes off the boil is the whole job.
- No quantity is givenA pint of water suggests a modest portion — figure 3/4 to 1 lb of fish, serving two. Scale the water so the fish is barely covered, since that liquid becomes the sauce and its saltiness sets the seasoning.
- Taste the water before adding salt"Salt if needed" is doing real work here. Old-style smoked sturgeon could leave the cooking water briny enough to need no salt at all; commercially smoked fish today varies widely. Taste after the fish comes out.
- "A piece of butter" and "a little flour"This is a small pan sauce in the velouté family: about 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour will thicken a cup of liquid to a coating consistency. Cook the flour in the butter for a minute before the liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty.
- Sourcing the fishWild Atlantic and shortnose sturgeon are protected and cannot be legally fished in the United States; all sturgeon and caviar are traded under CITES controls. Smoked sturgeon in shops today is farmed, generally white or Siberian sturgeon, and is what to buy.
- ServingHot, with the sauce poured over, as written. Boiled or steamed potatoes and a plain green vegetable would suit it, and the flour-thickened sauce wants something starchy beside it.
Sturgeon was Hudson River food before it was a luxury. The great runs that came up the river each spring were netted in such numbers through the nineteenth century that the flesh earned the nickname "Albany beef," and smokehouses along the river turned out slabs of it cheaply enough for everyday tables — which is why a recipe this offhand sits among the village receipts, with no note on how to obtain the fish or what it costs. The caviar trade eventually made the roe more valuable than the meat, and the fishery collapsed; New York closed sturgeon fishing entirely in 1996 and a coast-wide moratorium followed in 1998. The receipt also reflects a common treatment of preserved fish in this period: poach it to soften and desalt it, then build a butter-and-flour sauce from the same water.