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Baked Sturgeon, Virginia Style
A piece of sturgeon weighing six or seven pounds is enough for a handsome dish. Skin it and let it stand in salt and water for half an hour. Parboil it to remove the oil, making a dressing of bread crumbs, minute bits of fat salt pork, sweet herbs and butter. Gash the upper part of the fish quite deeply and rub the forcemeat well in; put in a baking pan with a little water to keep it from burning and bake for an hour. Serve with a sauce of drawn butter with a tablespoonful of capers stirred in.
A plain nineteenth-century treatment of a large, oily fish: salt, parboil, stuff the cuts, bake. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what drawn butter is and how hot to set the oven, so the gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Sourcing the fishWild Atlantic sturgeon is protected under the Endangered Species Act and all sturgeon species are CITES-listed; wild-caught fish is not legally on sale in the United States. Farmed sturgeon, mostly white sturgeon from California and Idaho, is sold as steaks or loin and is what this recipe should be made with.
- The parboil is the pointSturgeon carries a great deal of oil in and just under the skin, and the recipe's instruction to "parboil it to remove the oil" is the hinge of the dish. Ten to fifteen minutes at a bare simmer is enough for a large piece; boil it hard and you will have driven the fish most of the way to done before it ever sees the oven.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, suits a stuffed piece of this size. An hour is right for a parboiled 6-7 lb piece, but go by an internal temperature of 145F rather than the clock.
- The dressing, in quantitiesFor a fish this size, figure roughly 2 cups fresh bread crumbs, 4 oz fat salt pork cut very small, 4 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons chopped herbs. "Sweet herbs" means the mild kitchen herbs -- parsley, thyme, marjoram, a little sage -- as opposed to bitter or medicinal ones.
- Salt porkModern salt pork is often heavily cured and may need a brief blanch. Unsmoked fatback or pancetta stands in well; bacon will bring smoke the dish does not want.
- Gashing and stuffingCut down toward the backbone at intervals of about two inches and pack the forcemeat into the slits with your thumb. It will try to fall out during baking, so a couple of turns of kitchen string around the piece is worth the trouble.
- Drawn butterNot clarified butter. In American books of this period drawn butter is a simple white sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 2 tablespoons flour, thinned with a cup of hot water or fish stock, then finished with more butter. Stir in the capers off the heat.
- SaltingHalf an hour in salt and water is a light brine to firm the flesh, not a cure. Use roughly a quarter cup of salt to two quarts of cold water, and season lightly afterward.
- YieldA 6-7 lb piece serves ten to twelve as a main course, which is what the author means by "a handsome dish."
Sturgeon was for three centuries one of the defining foods of tidewater Virginia. The Chesapeake and the James ran thick with Atlantic sturgeon, fish that could reach twelve feet, and the Jamestown colonists' letters record eating them in quantity when little else was to hand; the flesh is firm and meaty enough that it was often compared to veal or beef rather than to other fish, which is why it takes a bread-and-pork forcemeat and an hour in the oven without falling apart. By the time this book appeared the picture had already changed. The late nineteenth-century caviar boom on the Delaware and the Chesapeake stripped the rivers within a few decades, and the species has never recovered; Atlantic sturgeon populations were listed under the Endangered Species Act in 2012. A recipe that once described a common regional fish now describes one that cannot legally be caught, and the dish survives only through aquaculture.