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Sturgeon Cutlet
Remove all the fat from the fish; cut it into steak pieces. Beat up the yolks of eggs enough to moisten the pieces well; dip them into the beaten egg. Have ready a dish of grated bread crumbs(stale bread is best), then roll them in the bread crumbs and pepper them well.
Prepare a vessel of melted lard, have it boiling hot, but not burnt; lay in the pieces of fish and cover with a lid. Turn them over as they brown and remove the lid when they are nearly done.-Mrs. Dr. P.C.
A plain breaded pan-fry, written for cooks who had sturgeon as a cheap river fish. The technique still works; the fish itself is now the hard part.
- Sourcing the fishWild sturgeon is no longer a market fish. Atlantic sturgeon is federally protected in the United States and all sturgeon species are covered by CITES, so the only legal supply is farmed, usually white sturgeon from California or Europe. Farmed fillets are firm, mild and behave much like the fish described here.
- "Remove all the fat"This is the instruction that matters. Sturgeon carries heavy fat under the skin and along the bloodline, and it turns strong and oily fast. Trim the skin, the grey-brown fat layer beneath it and the dark lateral line before cutting steaks.
- Cutting the steaksSturgeon has cartilage rather than bone, so it cuts cleanly. Steaks of about three-quarters of an inch fry evenly; thicker pieces will brown before the centre is done.
- "Boiling hot but not burnt" lardIn modern terms roughly 350-365F. Lard smokes somewhere above about 370F, so the working test without a thermometer is fat that shimmers and browns a crumb in under a minute. The recipe does not say how deep the fat should be.
- The lidCovering traps steam and softens the crumb coating. Cover for the first side only, to carry heat through a dense steak, then finish uncovered as the recipe says so the crust dries and crisps.
- SeasoningOnly pepper is called for; salt is not mentioned, as in many recipes of the period. Salt the fish before breading; the coating will not season the flesh afterwards.
- DonenessSturgeon is firm and dense, and it goes dry and rubbery if pushed. Around 135-140F internal keeps it moist, though 145F is the standard recommendation; roughly three to four minutes a side at that thickness.
- YieldFigure six to eight ounces of trimmed fish per person; two egg yolks and about a cup of stale crumbs will coat four steaks.
Sturgeon was once so common in the Chesapeake and the James that the Jamestown colonists lived on it through lean seasons, and Virginia households well into the nineteenth century treated it as everyday river food rather than a luxury. Its firm, almost meaty flesh invited meat cookery, and cutting it into "steak pieces" to be egged, crumbed and fried in lard is exactly how a cook of the 1870s would have handled veal. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from named and initialled Virginia housewives, and the attribution to "Mrs. Dr. P.C." is typical of the book's habit of crediting each donor. Within a few decades of its publication the fishery had collapsed under pressure from the caviar trade and river damming, and the fish that was cheap enough to fry in a Virginia kitchen became one that cannot legally be taken from the wild at all.