Skip to main content
Main

To Boil Sturgeon

A boiled sturgeon served with a sauce of butter, anchovy, mace, crab, shrimp, ketchup, and lemon, garnished with fried oysters and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 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 the liquid

  1. Clean the sturgeon and prepare the boiling liquid.

  2. In a pot, combine water, vinegar, horseradish, lemon peel, whole pepper, bay leaf, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil and add the sturgeon.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, melt the butter and dissolve the anchovy in it.

  2. Add mace, the body of the crab, shrimps or crawfish, ketchup, and lemon juice to the butter.

  3. Bring the sauce to a boil.

Serve

  1. Drain the sturgeon well and place it on a serving dish.

  2. Pour the sauce over the sturgeon and garnish with fried oysters, sliced lemon, and scraped horseradish.

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. Horse + radishtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together529 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Vinegar + radishtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together508 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Radish + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together174 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Horse + anchovytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Sturgeon (in the method)
Is the main fish, poached in the seasoned liquid until cooked through.
Butter
Forms the rich base of the sauce and carries its flavours and a silky texture.
Anchovy
Dissolves into the butter, adding savoury depth to the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity to the poaching liquid, sharpening the flavour of the fish.

The step that matters

Bring the sauce to a boil. Boiling the butter-based sauce can cause it to separate and turn greasy, since the fat and liquids split under high heat. Keeping the heat controlled helps it stay emulsified and smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, horse, radish, lemon, pepper, butter, anchovy):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, horse, radish, lemon, pepper, butter, anchovy. 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

Horseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce23 recipesHorseradish ButterHorseradish Butter6 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCrab SoupCrab Soup39 recipes