Off the Bone

We left Torsten knuckle deep in a ham, which by now is in the smokehouse. Charcuterie and the curing of meat is a ridiculously broad topic, the basics of which are fairly universal and easy enough to find in libraries or online. With an eye to specificity, I’ve decided to simply post the recipe we used, with comments and explanations in italics.

2lb salt
10g saltpeter
20g sugar
20g juniper berries
20g black peppercorns
3 bay leaves
5g nutmeg
Saltpeter is sodium nitrate, which, in and of itself, has no preservative effect at all. It does, however, get converted into nitrite by bacterial action, and nitrite, in addition to giving cured meat its colour, is a powerful preservative. Industrial cures use pure nitrite, but the byproducts of the bacterial conversion contribute to the flavour of artisanal charcuterie. Most cured meat, in fact, is fermented, by the exact same processes which wine and cheese are fermented, and the same family of bacteria – they produce lactic acid, which inhibits the growth of undesirable strains of bacteria, and the process shuts itself down when the lactic acid concentrations get too high for even lactobacteria to tolerate.
This is a dry cure – most meat is wet cured, by immersion in brine, because salt penetrates more quickly, and because less volume is lost. This is understandably appealing for industrial producers, but most traditional cures were wet also.
Grigson would have us believe that sugar is added not only for flavour but also to prevent “salt-burn” – a drying out and toughening of the surface of meat caused by too high a concentration of salt. As with most of her science, this is highly suspect, but it is actually possible to mess up a cure in this way.

Rub very firmly into meat, ensuring all surfaces are well coated. Stack in a tub, pour excess cure over the meat.
Torsten was ramming the cure as far as he could into the hock, so as to draw the fluid out from the knee. Since the synovial cavity is intact, we need to rely on osmotic action to do this, which is as problematic as it sounds. Hams, like our own unreliable carcasses, tend to go bad at the knee first.

Leave the tub in a cool, dry place. Every seven days, remove the joints from salt, brush them down and rub with fresh curing mix, preparing a fresh batch of cure if necessary. Drain the fluid that accumulates. Return to the tub, in reverse order (the one previously on top should go at the bottom), flipping the meat as well.

The duration of salting should be:
2 weeks for bacon & lardo
3 weeks for jowls
4 weeks for hams
My favourite part of the morning was when we had to dig the ribs out of the bacon. Normally you’d just cut the entire slab of meat off the bones, and sell the bones for spare ribs, but these had so little meat on them relative to the amount of fat that we’d practically have wound up with lardo if we’d done this. Lardo itself is back fat. You use it for cooking, and, yes, eating straight, in sweet, translucent shavings.

As a rough guide, a day in salt for a pound of meat.
Other sources suggest thickness may be a better guide, on the lines of 4 days per inch thickness of meat. This works out to about the same duration for everything but the hams (accounting for the fact that we had an aberrant amount of subcutaneous fat) – the hams, on the other hand, would have had to stay in almost twice as long).

Wash the meat off in cold running water, 12 hours for jowls and bacon, 24 hours for ham, dry in a warm air current.
Davidson would have us believe that this step is relatively uncommon outside Germany. Certainly Grigson never recommends this, and I haven’t seen it in Ruhlman’s new book either. Grigson’s recipes, English and French, tend to follow a dry cure with brine, after which the pork is either done or smoked – the brine effectively serves the same purpose, I suppose. Jabugo and prosciutto never get washed, merely brushed off or scrubbed down.

Everything gets a base smoke at 25-30 degrees C (80-90F) for 24 hours or till pale tan. Further smoking takes place according to the cut.
Lubeck is near enough the Baltic sea that it might as well be a coastal town. Long drying, in these conditions, is impossible, and so meat and fish are smoked instead when a dry cure is needed. Smoking ensures a suitably dry environment, as well as flavouring the meat and retarding the development of rancid flavours in fat – helpful, since salted meats are apparently more susceptible to fat breakdown. You can, incidentally, “wet-smoke” a meat – essentially by keeping the surface moist throughout the smoking process. The appeal of doing so is that, as with wet-curing, the effect is achieved much faster.

Bacon goes into a smoker at 18-20 C (65-70F) for 2-3 weeks till mahogany.
Jowls get heavy smoke at 40-50C (105-125F) for 4 days.
Hams stay in a cool smoke house at 18-20C (65-70F), getting a light smoke every other day, till asparagus sprouts.

Ham and asparagus is apparently a huge thing in northern Germany, like the first herrings in Denmark, or Beaujolais nouveau. The asparagus is steamed and served cold, and the dish goes with mustard.

It’s funny what people remember. Somehow, in the last few years, I’ve acquired a reputation of a coffee addict. It’s not undeserved, mind you, but compared to other peoples caffeine addictions mine is really quite mild: a cup of coffee a day, preferably in the mornings, and I politely decline offers of more except in emergencies. I even manage not to be cranky if my morning coffee is delayed. Sometimes. Nonetheless, one of the first things Helena said to me, with a degree of concern, in a taxi from the airport was: “You must be dying for coffee.” And I was, and off we went as soon as I dropped off my bags, and so began my tour of Budapest.

I had never before seen so little of a city I came to visit. Sure enough, there was the Buda castle, a visit to St. Stefan and St. Mattias cathedrals and the Budapest Synagogue, and even an obligatory visit to the Heroes Square and an art museum. But mostly I saw the insides of coffeeshops, Helenas kitchen, and her parents’ lovely house in the suburbs - where the kitchen was the exclusive realm of Helenas mother and I respectfully stood aside. Mrs. T is a marvelous and enthusiastic cook, but before we get into the subtleties of Hungarian cuisine I should get two things out of the way: paprika and goulash. Because that’s what you are already thinking about.

Buying paprika in Hungary is serious business. You have lots of choices: sweet or hot, fresh or dried, whole or ground up to different degrees of fineness, and from one of the two growing regions that produce distinct varieties. Fresh and whole dried are best bought at a farmers market - there are several of them in the city, housed in permanent pavillions and selling everything from pigs’ ears to butternut squash. Even in the middle of winter, the quality of fresh peppers was astounding - I ate a sweet red capsicum raw, thinking of July and Union Square greenmarket, and, accidentally, a piece of harmless looking light-green bell pepper that turned out to be quite quite hot. If you speak German, youll be able to ask what you are getting - for the older generation of Hungarians a German is a default foreigner and many speak the language.

Green hot peppers don’t seem to be dried, but red hot peppers are dried and sold whole, tied with pieces of string hung in magnificent rows over the vegetable stalls. They are handled very gingerly. A dried pepper would be crushed with the back of a spoon and served in a small dish to be added to soup or stew - also with a spoon, for the oils that get on your skin can come to haunt you long after the meal, when you forget all about the peppers and decide to rub your eye. The peppers are, in fact, surprisingly hot. A couple of small flakes dropped into a bowl of soup transformed it in a few seconds, and continued doing so until I decided to fish them back out. I was also shooed away from the table before desert to wash my hands, since I did pick up the flakes with my fingers.

Ground paprika can also be hot - it is then labeled scipos or eros. Sweet ground paprika is labeled scipossegmentes (mild) or edesnemes (sweet), or both. According to my Hungarian hosts youll want a pack that also says orlemeny (special, referring to paprika of particularly high quality). Paprika comes from two growing regions: Kalosca and Szeged, and according to my hosts, the stuff from Kalosca is more brightly red and more reliably good. I have packets of both and cannot tell the difference in taste or color, but paprika’s flavor really comes out in cooking, so who knows.

Sweet paprika is really present in just about everything, and together with onions and lard forms an essential part of a Hungarian flavor base. Ground, its a delicate spice and must not be overheated, or it may turn bitter. It does, however, need fat to release most of its goodness. In soups, it’s stirred in close to the end of cooking. In stews, it’s sprinked over the already browned meat, which is then taken immediately off heat (one can then add a liquid and begin braising - the gentle temperature of a braise will do no harm). Such is the method used in goulash - which is officially a soup, although the line between a soup and a stew can be fine indeed.

I did not have a homemade goulash on the trip, although I did get my host’s recipe - Christmas and New Years is not a time for goulash; families tend to cook pork and more elaborate holiday dishes (and fish on Christmas Eve, which is a day of fasting - even though its hard to tell by the quantity of food that is served). I did have a big bowl of goulash nonetheless, in a bistro-style eatery on a frosty day after touring the Buda castle. Its a very simple thing, really - beef, and broth, and root vegetables, and paprika for color and flavor, and maybe some caraway seeds and black peppercorns - and marvelous on a cold day. More complex recipes, including the one in the Joy of Cooking, seem to me to miss the point - perhaps in an attempt to mask the weak flavors of American vegetables and paprika alike.

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A few days ago I sat in the library periodical room. I brought my own work, but the more time I spent surrounded by journals, the more I felt that as an aspiring academic I should have some clue about their contents. Last I checked, nobody seemed to have stolen my dissertation topic, but for all I knew someone could have been making my job easier by doing related research. My eyes fell on the Journal of Modern History, for I sat near the Js, and I picked up the latest issue. A quick scan of the table of contents - and there it was, a review essay on food! In half an hour my notebook was filled with the additions to my “extracurricular” reading list, and I started thinking about other connections between food and academia, running not through research but through academics’ stomachs.

Except for the few cranky dieters, we love food, and, by and large, we are not too picky. This goes especially for graduate students. I don’t know what these people eat when they get to their homes, kitchens, and spouses, but almost everything flies in academic settings: cold pizza, hot pizza, leftover sandwiches from the luncheon seminar, chips and pretzels and any crunchy things from a bag, alcoholic beverages in any price range, carrot sticks with or without a dip, and anything with sugar in it. We do not exactly starve, but the stereotype of a starving student is so strong that it never fails to guide our hand to the proverbial cookie jar as long as the cookies are free.

This makes cooking for academics an easy business. Within the walls of the ivory tower were are all children, and food is exciting. We try every item in the buffet without trying to learn their ingredients first, stuff our mouths with chocolate-covered strawberries, and delight in florescent yellow ‘cola’ drinks with weird labels. I started a friendship with red onion marmalade, eased the stress of peer review with donut holes (bought), consoled colleagues with chocolate-cranberry cookies, and expressed gratitude with fresh apple cakes. We break bread to create a community, but also use food the way people before us must have used touch - to reach out to someone when words don’t cut it, and when touch is off limits.

And this, I think, is another reason we love food so much. Academia is lonely, and food means other people. Even if they just ordered it delivered. If they made it - that’s true love, whether or not it’s fully baked.

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Two years ago I took a course on Soviet history with a visiting Italian professor. He was one of the happiest men I’ve known. Between talking about the collapse of the Soviet Union he would tell us stories of his academic apprenticeship, his preferred order of photocopying pages from a book, his youngest daughter’s fascination with dragons, and his exasperation with well-meaning friends who took him for dinners in the Boston North End. A good home cook himself, he hated North End Italian. It was too rich, he thought, and too complex, as if the chefs could not resist throwing together all the ingredients they were unable to afford back in Italy, and created an imaginary “rich Italian” cuisine in their New World restaurants.

At the end of the semester I exchanged chocolate chip cookies for his daughters for his favorite home recipe - which turned out to be pumpkin pasta. It’s a lovely thing, flavors mild and clear, and perfect for fall. Aside from the pumpkin you will only need your pantry staples: garlic, olive oil, parsley, and, of course, pasta. If you cannot stand the simplicity, or have a fennel bulb in the pantry begging to be used, I’d let you add it too - although Andrea might frown.

Andrea started with raw pumpkin, peeled and sliced quite thinly. I prefer to pre-bake mine, because I don’t like peeling raw pumpkin. You can do either, but if you don’t pre-bake you should give your pumpkin time to cook almost completely in the skillet before you add pasta, which means starting the skillet as soon as you put your pasta pot on the stove. If you choose to pre-bake, keep the pumpkin in the oven until it can be pierced with a sharp knife but not yet smooshed with a spoon, and start the skillet when the pasta water is boiling (use robust dried pasta, not something that will cook in seconds).

For two servings you’ll need two cloves of garlic, half an acorn squash or equivalent (I used one small delicata squash, which was lovely), and a generous handful of parsley, chopped fine.

1. Sautee garlic in a generous quantity olive oil; when very fragrant and golden, add slices of pumpkin. Salt and pepper and wait, letting the pumpkin brown a bit (or cook if it’s raw).

2. Add chopped parsley, stir, fish out your still-uncooked pasta from the pot and dump it in the skillet with a little bit of pasta water. Stir and cook everything until the pasta is ready, adding more pasta water if you have to. Adjust salt, add more pepper, and serve piping hot.

3. Don’t sprinkle parmesan on top.

One of my first introductions to Italian cuisine took place in the Boston North End, where Tse Wei and I, both college freshmen, had a still slightly nervous but very romantic dinner. I had pasta in the shape of wide ribbons, with a creamy sauce and flakes of salmon. We were on the second floor of a small restaurant on the very edge of the neighborhood, and starry blue sky was painted on the ceiling, and I remember being a little concerned about twirling my noodles around the twines of the fork properly. But it was love at first sight. The pasta, I mean. Rich and tender and flavorful, with a delicate bite to the noodles, and a savory melting flakes of salmon, and probably some herbs, I don’t remember.

It was entirely different from the pasta I grew up with, which was served as simple side dish to meat, rarely dressed in anything more elaborate than a bit of butter, unless it’s cooked “fleet-style” - tossed with a bit of ground meet fried with onions. That was the dish that caused the sailor revolt on Battleship Potemkin - admittedly, because the meat was infested by maggots.

I cook pasta a lot now, but almost always with tomato-based sauces, wet and drippy. So I decided to explore other alternatives, with the capable guidance of Ms. Marcella Hazan, and came across a chicken liver sauce. I love chicken liver. According to Ms. Hazan, Italians tend to cook it with butter, sage, and white wine - although there are probably regional variations. All these things are present in the sauce recipe - along with some ground beef, pancetta or proscuitto (I actually used hog jowl that Tse Wei kindly brought from New York), shallots and garlic, and a bit of tomato paste. It is a lovely recipe, and a pleasure to make. Have your guests in the kitchen, as the smell of onions, garlic and sage sizzling in butter is mouthwatering.

The quantities in the recipe were not quite sufficient for the four people I tried to feed, so it’s been adapted a little.
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I’ve owed several people cookies since the summer, and cleared the debt today. I’m proud and privileged to have friends who would actually walk to their nearest post office in order to mail me books when I cannot find them myself (the atrociousness of the food in W-town being matched only by the atrociousness of the sole bookstore), and since they are abundantly supplied with reading material, I can only make them more comfortable when they read. In the mail went boxes of Sunshine Biscuits (each batch contains three days of sunshine – hence the bad weather in the Northeast), Date Liebnizen,¹ and, pictured above, with chicken, Arbitrary Chocolate Cookies.

Arbitrary Chocolate Cookies came about because I’d been feeling a kind of void in my life of late, a sibilant absence. Self examination revealed that this was partly a quarter-life crisis, and partly that I didn’t know how to bake a good chocolate cookie. Some people find religion fills their voids, I found this recipe to fill mine.

Really the problem, and I’m likely conflating the life-crisis and the recipe book here, is that I’ve never really been able to muster that much enthusiasm for the concept of a chocolate cookie, never having had one that made me see them as an objective good the way chocolate cake, flourless chocolate cake, hot chocolate and 1-kilo blocks of Valrhona are. Cookies, it seems, can never be just chocolate – you have to trick them out and dress them up – not merely chocolate cookies, but chocolate chocolate chip, or chocolate chip walnut, or chocolate white chocolate chip chocolate chunk cranberry, yet nothing you can add, append, prefix or attach to a cookie involving chocolate can raise its appeal beyond that conferred by the basic concept of cookie + chocolate. Still, we feel compelled, by some ineradicable impulse, to enliven, intensify, and complicate – a simple incarnation of chocolate in a cookie does not satisfy – we must separate the cookie and the chip. We are content to leave our chocolate cakes to stand alone, robed simply in icing, flourless chocolate things resist all attempts to dilute their intense purity, brownies absorb everything in their stride, but the poor cookie is frequently overwhelmed and rarely satisfying.

Perhaps it’s the way we eat them – on the fly, sneakily, an after-lunch impulse or a pre-coffee weakness, a perennial reminder of being caught with our hands where they should not be. The depth and power I demand from things labeled “chocolate” may not be entirely compatible with this casualness. The composition of the ideal cookie should seem as spontaneous and childlike as the manner of its consumption, full of whatever the cook decided to throw in, in whatever proportions she might have had them. We want variety, and unforced harmony, and dark chocolate is a serious flavour. It makes tart things seem too tart, sweet things seem too sweet, nuts seem lightweight and oatmeal coarse and inappropriate.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, but you can’t really fit too much more chocolate into a cookie than is in an Arbitrary Chocolate Cookie. Tasting them, it seems like there’s nothing you could add to them that wouldn’t work – and nothing you could add that would. Put anything you want in the batter, and it will be… okay. Itself. A chocolate cookie with nuts in it. With dried cherries in it. With white chocolate chunks in it. Always, fundamentally, unshakeably, a chocolate cookie. A chewy triple chocolate cookie, a chocolate chocolate chip cookie, a chocolate death monster at midnight cookie. Think of a name involving chocolate…

This recipe works. It tastes… pretty damn good. But I suspect nothing you can do to it while remaining true to the basic intent behind it will really get it beyond PDG. I do, however, have fairly concrete ideas about how an arbitrary chocolate cookie could be re-imagined, and will be trying those out in a couple of weeks.

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A good brunch is inconceivable without good company. One can, and sometimes needs to, eat one’s breakfast, lunch or dinner in solitude, but brunch is meant to be a convival affair, intimate but lively, where conversation flows as freely as coffee and one can afford to pay relatively little attention to food. After all, how adventurous can one get with eggs? (I shall leave aside my own misplaced childhood creativity, when I gleefully combined hard-boiled eggs with halved tomatoes and dots of sour cream to create replicas of highly poisonous mushrooms. They are known in Russian under the cheerful name of “death to flies.”)

The company at our housewarming brunch last Sunday was delightful, and the company has asked us to write about our quiches, so I will, after indulging in a little historical commentary.

As it happens, eggs had nothing to do with brunch as it appeared in England in the late 19th century (adding to the long list of British culinary contributions, such as the sandwich, banoffee pie, and Magna Carta). Brunch as a word was apparently invented in 1895 by Mr. Guy Beringer of Hunter’s Weekly, who wrote a passionate plea for introducing brunch as a meal. It was to be enjoyed upon returning from a Sunday morning hunt - or upon finally emerging out of bed after Saturday night’s carousing. It looked much like a caffeine-spiked dinner, less soup and vegetables, comprising cold cuts, meat loaves, ham toasts, and roasted larks for the ladies. Eggs became prominent only after brunch caught on in the States in the 1930s, first in hotel restaurants, then just about everywhere else. It was, I believe, a fortunate development.

Poached eggs and omelette have a longer brunch history than quiches do - perhaps because they are more impressive and less likely to be made for breakfast on a regular basis. They are hardly difficult, although making twelve individual ones might wear one down. Quiches are easy to make for any crowd, and flexible enough to accommodate any degree of culinary experimentation. The most difficult part of a quiche is the crust, and even here the difficulty is largely a myth, especially if you settle for a pat-in-the-pan crust that does not require any rolling. The rest of the quiche is simply filling bound with custard, baked until set. The number of possible fillings is infinite - the Joy will give you a good range of classics, and I have even seen quiche cook books - an example of soulless commercial publishing if ever there was one, for a quiche filling can be anything you want to make it (just don’t make it too wet), and the best cookbook is your own imagination. The two quiches we served were spinach and blue cheese, and roasted peppers, onions, and gouda.

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Back in the city, and none too soon. It’s late summer, and the produce in Union Square sits up and begs to be eaten. This is my favourite market season – perhaps because I was first overwhelmed by the greenmarket this time last year, perhaps because I’ve never seen the market in July. But right now, I swear, the market is perfect, a million stabs of Van Gogh colour, tomatoes and eggplants and peppers against a backdrop of greens so deep as to be black, shaded and made delicate by the flush of peaches, the bashful translucencies of baby greens and squash blossoms.

One superstar chef, Boulud, I think, said that in his first two years in the kitchen, he learned to tell a good carrot from a bad one. He was slow.¹ A good carrot, a good tomato, a good anything, knows it’s good and screams to be cooked, or crunched, or chunked and christened with salt and oil. A good eggplant even sounds perfect when you cut it, a delicate rasp – you can hear the juiciness, the micro-spray as the blade passes. It sounds like cutting freshness.

I hadn’t actually thought to make this entry about eggplants – they somehow aren’t as spectacular as tomatoes, or peppers, though they’re part of the same family (There are actually eggplants which are shades of orange and are shaped like tomatoes – these are a different species from the more common purple ones).² They seem stable, constant performers, mildly flavoured, a near perfect vehicle for aromatics in oil, lending body and cream to a dish rather than imprinting it with a distinct identity, as their more vividly coloured relatives do. But ripe eggplants feel heavy with the promise of sweetness and satisfaction, and fit a certain way in your palm. Their skins are coloured indigo and milk, and shades you see in the dawn sky. They do have a distinct season, which we are in the middle of – and Diana and I had a craving, and things you can crave tend to be worth writing about.

Eggplants come from Asia and Africa (McGee makes a specific claim for India), and show their tropical roots by going bad quickly in the fridge, as the cold collapses the delicate sponge inside them. They arrived in Europe via the usual route (Arabia, through trade and war) in the 13th Century, and are the only edible nightshades which come from the old world. Since then, asian and western strains have become distinctly different on the plate, the former smoother and creamier, the latter having a little more structure, frequently described as meaty. Their uniquely spongy texture gives them a near insatiable thirst for oil, though the cook is by no means obliged to give in to this. The Joy suggests precooking by a variety of methods, my mother, as in the recipe below, has had success simply searing them. For this reason, however, eggplant dishes can be inordinately rich – a famous Arab recipe, imam bayildi, involves stuffing eggplants with onions and baking them in an overgenerous quantity of olive oil. The name means “the imam fainted,” allegedly after his wife told him how much oil had gone into the dish. A highly attractive recipe, along with an extended discussion of the origins of both dish and name, may be found at this excellent website.

I suggest further going here to see some of the orange eggplants I mentioned, and here for an altogether too earnest description of some of the varieties available in Japan.

I like eggplants which I can cup in my hand. Larger eggplants tend to be older, and eggplants grow bitter with age. Forget any that don’t feel heavy. Surface blemishes tend not to matter, especially on western eggplants, which have substantially thicker skins than asian ones. At home, we char eggplants in a wok, and flavour them emphatically, with chili and black bean sauce. The result is very like an eggplant caviar, and, if you scorch the eggplants right, will have some of the smokiness you usually need a charcoal fire to achieve. This recipe works with both Asian and Western eggplants – the former will give you something a little like custard, a little like rhubarb preserve, and a lot more appealing than this sounds. The latter will give you eggplant caviar with distinct chunks, pleasantly resistant until they melt away.

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My mother and I never shared a kitchen. She stopped cooking soon after I learned to boil an egg, put as much jam on my bread as I wanted, and eat the tasty things on my plate first, not necessarily bothering with the rest. Having thus given me an excellent culinary background she waltzed out of the kitchen, sure that from then on I could take care of myself. Ever since mom’s happily subsisted on fruit and sandwiches. When remodeling our kitchen, she chose extra closet space over an oven, and a cast-iron skillet for bliny over all other kitchen gadgets - including a peeler, a collander, and a chopping board. Bliny is the only thing mom cooks - with great skill and style.

The kitchen is Riga is now unquestionably my kitchen - still sans oven, but now with peeler, collander and a chopping board. But there’s still something about cooking for your mother. I try to show off. A lot. This is how zucchini pancakes were born.

May Clotilde of Chocolate and Zucchini forgive me, but I’m often at a loss with zucchini. They are such pretty vegetables, and so good for you, and so plentiful in summer, and mom loves them… But to me they just don’t taste of much. I always buy them and usually end up grilling or roasting to concentrate the mild flavor, or gently caramelizing them, cubed, on a dry skillet, letting the pale flesh turn golden. Here, sadly, roasting is out of the question, and caramelizing is more delicious than impressive. Hence pancakes: they come out very tender, emphasizing the gentle creaminess of zucchini, and the tomato and chevre filling gives a bright burst of flavor. They are also exceedingly simple.

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Before I continue my review of freshwater fish with sturgeon, I should offer a note on translation and an apology for the increased use of Latin (for this post and the next). It is difficult to translate the names of any but the most common animals and plants accurately, because the words are sometimes missing. Russian has at least four common-knowledge names for different species of fish in the sturgeon family, and a few for different types of wild strawberries (often regionalisms, since wild strawberries even now travel much less than fish). Hence Latin. So you could look these things up if you ever have a mind to do so.

So, sturgeon. This family includes species that are firmly freshwater and those that are anadromous (i.e. live in salt water and spawn in streams). They are a very old fish family whose ancestors could already be found in the Jurassic period. Like many an old family, they have done quite well for themselves, and better in Europe than in America (where the sturgeon population was greatly reduced through pollution, damming, and overfishing). The best-known representative is perhaps beluga - the largest freshwater fish and a source of most of European caviar - but the lesser members of the family are equally valuable from the culinary viewpoint and are sufficiently valuable commercially to fall victim to regular poaching. This fate also befell the two fishies I cooked and ate - probably sterliad (Acipenser ruthenus) - freshwater native of the Black, Caspian and Azov sea basins - although they could also have been small sevrugas (A. stellatus), who are coresidential with sterliad’ and come to the same rivers to spawn. The two species have also been crossed by Soviet biologists; their offspring proved able to breed and are now called “bester.”

Sturgeons are very unusual-looking fish - and perhaps the cutest I’ve seen. The best thing about them is the snout - they have long, thin, slightly flattened noses and little whiskers that make them look perpetually curious. Sturgeon have no scales, but their bodies are covered with bony plates: five rows of sharp spiky ones (along the spine and two per side), and something on the rest of their skin that makes it slippery in one direction and sandpaper-rough in the other. These plates cannot be cleaned off - the regular ones apparently dissolve when the fish is cooked, but the rows of spikes remain dangerous and have to be watched. I was informed a few days after I was finished with my fishies that they can be peeled like tomatoes - immerse in boiling water for 10 seconds, and the skin should come off like a glove. I personally quite like the skin, despite the caution it requires.

Sturgeons of all species, are delicious, and, despite being freshwater fish, not terribly bony. If you don’t like fish at all, you may well like sturgeon. Their flesh is white, firm, meltingly smooth, delicately sweet, and not at all “fishy.” They can be smoked to marvelous effect, grilled whole, panfried, braised, or made into soup - the latter two are traditional in Russian cuisine, and for good reason. Of all fish, sturgeon makes perhaps the best stock - their spines are cartilage, and stock quickly thickens. I don’t know any truly traditional Russian recipes, and there are no great tricks to either fish soups or braises. If you decide on the latter, I suggest first making stock out of the heads and tails, then braising the rest of the fish in it (with the usual onions, smashed garlics, herbs - try dill for a more Russian take). Chill the whole thing until the braising liquid turns to jelly. Kick your family out of the kitchen if you must - it really will be much better cold.

Some notes on prep:
- use paper towels or rubber gloves to handle unskinned fish - avoiding the spikes is a pain, and the rest of the fish is really remarkably slippery
- thick skin - sharp knife
- a good way to remove the head - make deep incisions from both sides, from behind the fins to under the cheek plates, then slide the knife under the top head plate and cut the spine
- sturgeon is a fatty fish and hence forgiving of overcooking. Like with every freshwater fish, don’t undercook