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To Roast a Sturgeon

Roasted sturgeon served with a sauce of wine, oysters, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 22 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Roast a Sturgeon

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Soak the sturgeon in a mixture of salt and water for 6–8 hours.

  2. Clean and scrape the sturgeon thoroughly.

  3. Fix the sturgeon on a spit.

Roast

  1. Baste the sturgeon with butter while roasting.

  2. Dredge the fish occasionally with flour.

  3. Mix the grated bread, sweet herbs, and parsley with a little butter and sprinkle the mixture over the fish.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine water, anchovy, lemon peel, onion, sweet herbs, mace, cloves, black and white pepper, and horseradish in a saucepan.

  2. Cover the saucepan and boil for 15 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture and return the strained liquid to the saucepan.

  4. Add white wine, oysters with their liquor, walnut ketchup, and the butter rolled in flour.

  5. Let the sauce simmer.

  6. Pour the sauce over the roasted sturgeon before serving.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

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

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

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. Bread + anchovytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,260 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Sturgeon
Is the main fish that is cooked and served, forming the body of the dish.
Butter
Bastes the fish during roasting, adding richness and helping the surface brown.
Flour
Dredged over the fish, helping form a light crust that browns during roasting.
Oysters
Add briny flavour and body to the sauce through their meat and liquor.
White wine
Adds acidity and depth to the sauce as it reduces with the strained broth.
Bread
Grated and mixed with herbs to form a crumb coating that crisps on the fish.

The step that matters

Let the sauce simmer. Once the oysters and butter rolled in flour are added, gentle simmering thickens the sauce and cooks the oysters without toughening them. Boiling hard can make the oysters rubbery and can cause the flour-thickened butter to separate or lump.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sturgeon, butter, flour, bread, parsley, anchovy, lemon. 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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