Baked Sturgeon

A piece of sturgeon weighing five or six pounds is enough for a handsome dish. Skin it and let it stand in salt and water for half an hour. Parboil it to remove the oil. Make a dressing of bread-crumbs, minute bits of fat salt pork, sweet herbs, and butter. Gash the upper part of the fish quite deeply, and rub this force-meat well in ; put in a baking-pan with a little water to keep it from burning, and bake for an hour.

Serve with a sauce of drawn butter, in which has been stirred a spoonful of caper sauce and another of catsup.

This is a Virginia receipt, and an admirable one.

Mayonnaise. (Fish.)

Take a pound or so of cold boiled fish (halibut, rock, or cod), cut - not chop - into pieces an inch in length. Mix in a bowl a dressing as follows: the yolks of four boiled eggs rubbed to a smooth paste with salad oil; add to these salt, pepper, mustard, two teaspoonfuls white sugar, and, lastly, six tablespoonfuls of vinegar. Beat the mixture until light, and just before pouring it over the fish, stir in lightly the frothed white of a raw egg. Serve the fish in a glass dish, with half the dressing stirred in with it. Spread the remainder over the top, and lay blanched lettuce-leaves around the edges, to be eaten with it.

Baked Salmon-Trout+

Those who have eaten this prince of game fish in the Adirondacks, within an hour after he has left the lake, will agree with me that he never has such justice done him at any other time as when baked with cream.

Handle the beauty with gentle respect while cleaning, washing, and wiping him, and lay him at full length, still respectfully, in a baking-pan, with just enough water to keep him from scorching. If large, score the back-bone with a sharp knife, taking care not to mar the comeliness of his red-spotted sides. Bake slowly, basting often with butter and water. By the time he is done - and he should be so well-looked after that his royal robe hardly shows a seam or rent, and the red spots are still distinctly visible - have ready in a saucepan a cup of cream - diluted with a few spoonfuls of hot water, lest it should clot in heating - in which have been stirred cautiously two tablespoonfuls of melted butter and a little chopped parsley. Heat this in a vessel set within another of boiling water, add the gravy from the dripping-pan, boil up once to thicken, and when the trout is laid - always respectfully - in a hot dish, pour the sauce around him as he lies in state. He will take kindly to the creamy bath, and your guests will take kindly to him. Garnish with a wreath of crimson nasturtium blooms and dainty sprigs of parsley, arranged by your own hands on the edge of the dish, and let no sharply-spiced sauces come near him. They would but mar his native richness - the flavor he brought with him from the lake and wild-wood. Salt him lightly, should he need it, eat and be happy.

If the above savor of bathos rather than " common sense," my excuse is, I have lately eaten baked salmon-trout with cream-gravy.