Skip to main content
Main

To Boil Sturgeon

A boiled sturgeon served with vinegar, horseradish, lemon peel, and garnished with fried oysters, sliced lemon, and horseradish, finished with melted butter or anchovy sauce.

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

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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. Clean the sturgeon well.

  2. In a pot, boil enough water to just cover the sturgeon.

  3. Add lemon peel, whole pepper, horseradish, and vinegar to the water.

Serve

  1. Once cooked, garnish with fried oysters, sliced lemon, and horseradish.

  2. Serve with melted butter or anchovy sauce.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + horseradishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Sturgeon + oystertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Horseradish + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sturgeon
Forms the main body of the dish and is the protein that is cooked and served.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the poaching liquid and the fish.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent aroma that complements the mild richness of the fish.

“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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesHorseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce17 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipes