Skip to main content
Main

To Bake Sturgeon

A baked sturgeon served with a brown gravy made from wine, mushroom ketchup, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Bake Sturgeon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Scrape the sturgeon well and cut out the gristle.

  2. Boil the sturgeon for about 20 minutes to remove the oil.

  3. Remove the sturgeon from the pot, pull off the large scales, and let it cool.

  4. Stuff the cooled sturgeon with a mixture of bread crumbs, butter, chopped parsley, pepper, and salt.

Stew and finish

  1. Place the stuffed sturgeon in a Dutch oven with 1½ pints of water, ⅓ cup red wine, mushroom ketchup, salt, and pepper.

  2. Stew gently until the gravy reduces to the desired amount.

  3. Carefully remove the sturgeon and thicken the gravy with 2 tablespoons of butter rubbed into 1 tablespoon of brown flour until smooth.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Red wine + mushroomtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together720 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Mushroom + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sturgeon
Provides the main body of the dish, which is cooked gently until tender in the stew.
Bread crumbs
Absorb butter and juices in the stuffing, keeping the filling moist and binding it together.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth to the gravy as it reduces during stewing.
Brown flour
Thickens the gravy when rubbed with butter, giving it body and a smooth texture.

The step that matters

Thickening the gravy with butter and flour. Rubbing butter into flour before adding it keeps the flour from clumping. Stirring it in smoothly, off the heat if needed, gives a silky gravy instead of lumps.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sturgeon, red wine, mushroom, ketchup, pepper, bread, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Clovefits about as well
  4. Celeryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sturgeon, red wine, mushroom, ketchup, pepper, bread, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipes