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To Boil Sturgeon

A dish of sturgeon slices seasoned with pepper and salt, broiled and served with lemon, melted butter, and catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Boil Sturgeon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skin from the sturgeon and cut it into slices.

  2. Season the slices with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Broil the slices over a clear fire.

  2. Rub each slice with a bit of butter.

  3. Serve with lemon or dip in seasoning or forcemeat, wrapped in buttered white paper, and broil.

Sauce and garnish

  1. For sauce, serve melted butter with catsup.

  2. Garnish with sliced lemon.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Sturgeon + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together237 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Sturgeon + lemontop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together136 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Sturgeon
Firm, lean flesh that forms the main body of the dish and holds its shape when broiled.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture, keeping the lean fish from drying out and giving richness.
Catsup
Adds sweet, tangy flavour to the dipping sauce served with the melted butter.

The step that matters

Broiling the slices. Sturgeon is lean and dries out quickly over direct heat, so the butter rub helps keep the slices moist, and they should be watched closely while they broil.

“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.

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