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Baked Sturgeon
Wash the skin well, put in a pan and bake for three-quarters of an hour. Then take it out on a dish; pierce it with a knife in several places. Make a stuffing of pot-meat, bread crumbs, onions, parsley, thyme, pepper, and salt, all chopped well together. Stuff the holes with the mixture and put the rest in the gravy; return to the pan and bake until done.--Mrs.D.
A whole-fish roast written for cooks who bought sturgeon by the piece from a river landing and judged doneness by eye. Two things need translating: the stuffing, and the fish itself.
- Pot-meatThis means potted meat — cooked beef or veal (sometimes ham) pounded with butter and spice to a paste and sealed under fat, a preparation common in nineteenth-century American cookbooks. A modern equivalent is a coarse country pâté or rillettes, or simply well-seasoned cooked ground pork; it is there to bind the crumbs and herbs and add fat.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as the recipe simply says "bake." Around 350F works for a thick fish roast; the first three-quarters of an hour is a partial cooking, not a finish.
- "Bake until done"Sturgeon is dense, meaty and easy to ruin, and long baking turns it dry and stringy rather than flaky. Cooks aiming for a firm but moist result often pull it at 130-140F at the thickest point, though standard food-safety guidance for fish is 145F. The second stint in the oven only needs to heat the stuffing through.
- The skin"Wash the skin well" assumes the fish arrives with its hide and bony scutes on. Sturgeon skin is thick and armoured, and it is often sold skinned today. If yours has skin, score it or remove it after the first bake, since it will not crisp usefully.
- GravyThe gravy is simply the pan liquor from the first bake, sturgeon being oily enough to render some. Add a little stock or white wine if the pan looks dry before you spoon in the remaining stuffing, or it will scorch.
- SourcingWild Atlantic sturgeon is protected in the United States and cannot legally be taken; the Chesapeake fishery the book assumes has been closed for decades. Farmed sturgeon, mainly white and Siberian, is sold legally and is what to use here.
- Quantity and yieldThe original names no weight. Scale the stuffing to roughly half a cup per pound of fish; a 3 lb piece with about a cup and a half of stuffing serves six.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), Marion Cabell Tyree's compilation of contributions from named Virginia housekeepers — hence the terse "Mrs. D." — treats sturgeon as an ordinary market fish, which in the tidewater Chesapeake it then was. Sturgeon ran up the James and Rappahannock in enormous numbers; the Jamestown colonists ate and salted them, and further north the flesh was firm enough to earn the nickname "Albany beef." That meaty character may explain the meat stuffing here, which would look odd applied to a delicate fish. The abundance did not last: commercial fishing for flesh and caviar in the closing decades of the century collapsed the Atlantic stocks, and the fish that a Virginia housekeeper could once buy cheap is now federally protected.