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Sturgeon or Drum
Slice it like beefsteak, and roll in a thin egg batter, and fry in hot lard. Chopped parsley and black pepper may be added, if liked.--Mrs. D., Suffolk.
Two lines of instruction that assume a cook who has handled large fish before. The essentials are the thickness of the cut, the temperature of the fat, and knowing when to stop cooking.
- Sourcing the fishWild Atlantic sturgeon has been federally protected in the United States since 2012 and cannot be taken or sold; the sturgeon in markets today is farmed, usually white sturgeon or a hybrid, and works exactly as described. "Drum" in Tidewater Virginia means red or black drum, both still fished. Large black drum are generally reckoned coarser than small ones, so smaller fish are the better buy.
- Slice it like beefsteakSteaks or crosswise slabs rather than fillets; the recipe gives no thickness, but about 3/4 inch suits both fish. Sturgeon and drum are dense and meaty enough to hold up to this treatment; thinner slices dry out before the batter colors.
- Trim the dark lineSturgeon carries a strip of dark, oily flesh along the lateral line and under the skin. It is strong-flavored and best cut away before battering. The skin should come off too.
- A thin egg batterBeaten egg loosened with a spoonful or two of milk or water, seasoned, with the fish dusted in flour first so the egg has something to cling to. It is a coating, not a jacket -- if it sits on the fish in a layer it is too thick.
- Hot lardShallow-fry in about 1/4 inch of fat at 350-365F. Lard is the period-appropriate choice and good for flavor, though its smoke point is lower than that of refined peanut oil, which also works. The fat should shimmer and a drop of batter should sizzle immediately.
- TimingAbout 3-4 minutes per side for a 3/4-inch steak. Public-health guidance for fish is an internal 145F; cooks who prefer sturgeon moister often pull it lower, accepting the risk. Sturgeon overcooked goes from meaty to chalky quickly.
- Parsley and pepperThe original does not say where these go. Folding them into the egg is the likelier reading and gives a better result than sprinkling them on the finished fish.
- YieldRoughly 6 oz of trimmed fish per person as a main course, so about 1 1/2 lb for four, which two eggs will coat.
Sturgeon was once so plentiful in the James and the Chesapeake that early Virginia colonists wrote home about living on it, and by the nineteenth century Virginia was a serious supplier of both sturgeon flesh and caviar to Northern markets, a trade whose peak came in the 1880s and 1890s, after this book. That fishery collapsed within a generation or two of this book: Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, catches the fish at the end of its abundance, treated as an everyday frying fish rather than a luxury. The pairing with drum in a single recipe is telling -- both were cheap, firm, large-flaked fish that could be cut into steaks and handled like meat, which is exactly how a Tidewater cook thought of them. The attribution to "Mrs. D., Suffolk" is typical of the book, which was assembled from contributions by some two hundred and fifty Virginia housekeepers, credited variously by full name or by initials.