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Updated: June 29, 2025
The solid part of the soup, served on a platter, so that each person might mix the ingredients according to his taste, consisted of cold boiled sterlet, raw ham, more cubes of cucumber, more bits of green onion tops, lettuce, crayfish, grated horseradish, and granulated sugar. The first time I encountered this really delectable dish, it was served with salmon, the pale, insipid northern salmon.
Of a deep gold, almost orange color, with the rich fat, and clear as a topaz, it was utterly unlike anything we had ever tasted. We understood the despair of Parisian gourmets and cooks, and we confirmed the verdict, provisionally announced at breakfast, that the sterlet is the king of all fish. As it is indescribable, I may be excused for not attempting to do justice to it in words.
The sterlet is expensive in regions where the cook-book flourishes, and the other fish are merely a cheat of town economy. The scum is not removed, this is the capital point, but stirred in as fast as it rises. If the ukha be skimmed, after the manner of professional cooks, the whole flavor and richness are lost.
We might not have been of much real assistance, but we learned, at least, how heavy is this toil, repeated many times a day, even when the pouch reveals so slender a catch as in the present instance. There was nothing very valuable in it, though there was variety enough, and we were deceived, for a moment, by several false sterlet.
It is probably a vulgar detail, but I must chronicle the fact that the cooking on these Volga steamers on the line we patronized, at least is among the very best to be found in Russia, in my experience. On the voyage upstream, when they are well supplied with sterlet and other fish, all alive, from Astrakhan, the dinners are treats for which one may sigh in vain in the capitals of St.
While the soup was boiling and more sterlet were being grilled in their own fat, as a second course, our men pitched our tent and ran up our flag, and the butler set the table on our big rug. It was lucky that we had purchased fish at our breakfast-place, as no sterlet had been caught at this camp. When the soup made its appearance, we comprehended the epithet "amber" and its fame.
Petersburg and Moscow, with their mongrel German-French-Russian cookery. The dishes are very Russian, but they are very good. I remember one particularly delicious concoction was composed of fresh sterlet and sour cabbage, with white grapes on top, baked to a brown crispness. We arrived at our wharf on the Volga front of the old town of Nizhni Novgorod about five o'clock in the afternoon.
After these may be placed the sturgeon and sterlet of the Caspian, the silurus of the Sea of Aral, the Aleppo eel, and the palla, a small but excellent fish, which is captured in the Indus during the flood season.
We never hear a word but Dolokhov is mentioned. They swear by him, they offer him to you as they would a dish of choice sterlet. Dolokhov and Anatole Kuragin have turned all our ladies' heads."
Promises of vodka at the end of the voyage, when the danger was over, were rejected without hesitation. We reached our breakfast-ground in profound silence. Fortunately, the catch of sterlet at this stand had been good.
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