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Sturgeon a LA Ude

A French-style sturgeon dish cooked in salt water and served with a reduced elder vinegar and velouté sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Caviar and butter work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 107 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sturgeon a LA Ude

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean and wash the sturgeon.

  2. Place it in a fish kettle with salt and cover with boiling water.

  3. Boil until cooked.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, boil the elder vinegar until reduced by half.

  2. Add the velouté sauce and caviar to the vinegar and bring to a boil.

  3. Move the sauce to the side of the fire and add butter and beaten egg yolks.

  4. Season with salt and pepper, stirring until thick but do not boil after adding eggs.

Serve

  1. Drain the fish, place it on a hot dish, pour the sauce over it, and serve.

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. Caviar + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together107 recipes

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

  2. Caviar + eggtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together101 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Sturgeon + saucetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together93 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  5. Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sturgeon
Is the main protein that is poached and served with the sauce.
Elder vinegar
Reduced by boiling to concentrate its sharp acidity for the sauce.
Velouté sauce
Forms the thickened base that gives the sauce body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy texture to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce through gentle heating and add richness.
Caviar
Adds salty, briny flavour and a garnish-like finish to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken by setting gently at moderate heat. If the sauce boils after the eggs go in, the yolks can scramble and curdle, leaving the sauce grainy instead of smooth.

“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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