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To Roast a Piece of Fresh Sturgeon

A roasted sturgeon served with a sauce of anchovy, wine, oysters, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 27 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

To Roast a Piece of Fresh Sturgeon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Soak the sturgeon in water and coarse sea salt for 6 to 8 hours with the scales on.

  2. Fasten the sturgeon on a spit.

Roast the fish

  1. Baste the sturgeon with butter for 15 minutes.

  2. Sprinkle flour, grated nutmeg, mace, finely ground black pepper, coarse sea salt, dried sweet herbs, and bread crumbs over the fish.

  3. Continue basting the sturgeon.

  4. Add bread crumbs until the fish is cooked through.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine water, anchovy, lemon peel, onion, sweet herbs, mace, cloves, whole black and white pepper, and horseradish.

  2. Cover the saucepan.

  3. Boil the mixture for 15 minutes.

  4. Strain the mixture.

  5. Return the strained liquid to the saucepan.

  6. Add white wine, oysters with their liquor, ketchup, walnut pickle, and the bruised crab (or lobster, shrimps, or prawns).

  7. Add butter rolled in flour and mushroom pickle (or lemon juice) to the sauce.

  8. Boil the sauce together.

Serve

  1. Place the cooked fish on a dish.

  2. Pour the sauce over the fish.

  3. Garnish with fried toasts and lemon slices.

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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Sturgeon + anchovytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43 recipes

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 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, cooked until firm and flaky through roasting.
Butter
Bastes the fish, adding richness and promoting golden browning on the surface.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust on the outside of the fish during roasting.
Oysters
Add briny flavour and body to the sauce through their liquor and flesh.
White wine
Adds acidity and depth to the sauce, balancing the rich butter.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when rolled in butter and stirred in, giving it body.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce together after adding the butter rolled in flour. Flour-thickened butter needs to be heated fully so the starch swells and the sauce thickens smoothly without a raw, pasty taste.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sturgeon, butter, flour, nutmeg, pepper, bread, anchovy):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sturgeon, butter, flour, nutmeg, pepper, bread, 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.

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