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Scolloped Sturgeon
Four pounds sturgeon, boiled; when cold, pick to pieces and then wash and squeeze out the water. Make a mayonnaise dressing, using celery, cayenne pepper instead of black pepper, and salt. Serve on white lettuce leaves.--Mrs.
Despite the title, nothing here is scalloped or baked: this is a cold picked-fish salad dressed with mayonnaise, of the kind Virginia households made from leftover boiled fish. The original assumes you know how to make mayonnaise and how much of it to use, so the proportions are yours to judge.
- Sourcing the fishWild sturgeon has effectively vanished from the American market; the Atlantic sturgeon that once ran up the James and the Rappahannock is federally protected and cannot be taken. Farmed sturgeon (white sturgeon from California, or Siberian sturgeon) is sold legally and is what to buy. Firm-fleshed farmed catfish or halibut will also carry this dressing.
- Poach, don't boilFour pounds of sturgeon steaks or fillet want a gentle simmer in salted water, not a rolling boil, until the flesh is just opaque at the thickest point -- roughly 8 to 10 minutes per inch of thickness. Sturgeon is dense and takes overcooking better than most fish, but hard boiling still squeezes it dry and stringy.
- Cool completely firstThe instruction to pick it only when cold is not incidental. Warm sturgeon shreds into mush; chilled, it separates into firm flakes that hold their shape under dressing. Refrigerate the cooked fish several hours or overnight.
- Washing and squeezingRinsing the picked fish and pressing out the water removes poaching liquid that would otherwise thin the mayonnaise into a puddle by the time it reaches the table. Squeeze firmly in a clean towel, not so hard that you compact the flakes into paste.
- The dressing, in modern termsTaking the four pounds as raw weight, which yields roughly 2 to 2 1/2 pounds picked, figure about a cup of mayonnaise. Add the celery finely diced -- a cup is a reasonable start -- along with salt and cayenne to taste. Dress it lightly and add more; you cannot take it back out.
- Cayenne instead of black pepperThe recipe gives no reason for the substitution, though appearance may be part of it: black specks show in a pale dressing, cayenne disappears into it. A scant 1/4 teaspoon is enough to be felt in a cup of mayonnaise.
- If you make the mayonnaise from scratchIt will contain raw egg and no acid beyond the vinegar or lemon. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the finished salad refrigerated until it goes to the table.
- Yield and servingEnough for 8 to 10 as a first course or luncheon dish. "White lettuce leaves" means the pale inner leaves of a head lettuce -- the cupped hearts of iceberg or butterhead, chosen to make a cool white bed for the pink-tinged fish.
Sturgeon was once so common in the Chesapeake and its rivers that it was cheap food rather than luxury, and Virginia cookbooks treat it the way they treat any large firm fish -- boiled, pickled, made into steaks, or, as here, picked cold and dressed. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, is full of these signed fragments, and the abrupt "--Mrs." at the end is the book's own habit of crediting its sources, here truncated. What the recipe does not anticipate is the collapse of the fishery. Heavy commercial harvest for flesh and caviar in the late nineteenth century, along with dams and pollution, reduced Atlantic sturgeon to a fraction of their former numbers, and the population that made this a household dish is now protected rather than eaten.