Baked Sturgeon
Take a piece of sturgeon, about four pounds, wash and parboil for fifteen minutes; then put in a pan with a little water and bake about an hour, basting with butter occasionally. Serve with drawn butter.
A bare-bones nineteenth-century treatment of a firm, meaty fish that behaves more like veal than like cod. Two things need attention: where the fish comes from, and how long it actually needs in the oven.
- Sourcing the fishAll sturgeon species are CITES-listed, and commercial harvest of wild sturgeon is closed or tightly restricted, so wild-caught sturgeon is effectively unavailable in ordinary markets. Farmed sturgeon, raised chiefly for caviar, is sold as fillets and steaks and is what to buy; a firm white fish such as swordfish or halibut steak takes the same treatment.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, and no oven descriptor either. Around 350F suits a thick piece baked with a little water in the pan.
- The hour is too longA four-pound piece of sturgeon baked for a full hour after parboiling is likely to come out dry. Cook to 145F internal and start checking well before the hour is up; a two-inch centre-cut piece, already parboiled, will need far less.
- Why parboil at allSturgeon is a relatively oily fish, and period cookbooks commonly directed that it be parboiled, a step usually explained as drawing off oil and any muddiness from wild fish. Farmed sturgeon does not need it; if you want the step, three or four minutes in simmering salted water is ample, not fifteen.
- Basting with butterMelt the butter first and spoon it over every ten minutes or so. Sturgeon has little connective tissue to keep it moist, and the pan water plus butter is the whole moisture strategy here.
- Drawn butterNot clarified butter, despite the modern usage. In American cookbooks of this era drawn butter is a thin white sauce: about a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together, a cup of hot water or fish stock whisked in, simmered a few minutes, then finished with more butter and salt.
- YieldFour pounds of fish on the bone serves six to eight; a four-pound boneless piece will stretch to ten.
Sturgeon was cheap American food long before it was luxury food. Through the nineteenth century the Hudson, Delaware and Columbia rivers yielded sturgeon in such quantity that the flesh was nicknamed Albany beef, and the fish appears in household cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s as an economical roasting piece rather than a delicacy. The Butterick Cook Book, published in 1911 by the pattern company as part of its broad line of domestic manuals, catches the tail end of that abundance: within a generation the great river runs had collapsed under fishing pressure for flesh and roe together with dam building, and by the late twentieth century sturgeon populations worldwide were protected. The recipe's plainness is the point, as it treats a four-pound piece the way it would treat a joint of meat, with basting and a flour-thickened butter sauce, which is how cooks handled a fish that came to the kitchen in slabs rather than whole.