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Bloater Roes
Dust a little cayenne pepper over the roes, dip them in rich batter, and fry until of a golden brown; garnish with watercress. The soft roes only should be used. An excellent after-dinner savoury.
A savoury in the strict Victorian sense: a small, sharply seasoned mouthful served after the sweet course. The whole thing takes ten minutes once the roes are in hand.
- What a bloater isA bloater is a whole herring, ungutted, lightly brined and cold-smoked, so the roe stays inside and takes on some of the smoke. Kippers are split and gutted, so the roe is often removed, though some are still sold with it in; otherwise buy whole bloaters, or ask a fishmonger for herring milt separately.
- Soft roe means miltThe soft roe is the male fish's milt, creamy and pale; the hard roe is the female's egg mass, granular and firm. The instruction to use soft roes only is the hinge of the dish: hard roes turn dry and sandy in batter, while soft roes cook to a texture close to a rich custard. Frozen milt is sometimes found in Japanese shops (shirako, though usually cod) and in Scandinavian shops.
- HandlingMilt is fragile and tears easily. Rinse in cold water, pat thoroughly dry, and lift with a spoon or fish slice rather than tongs. Some cooks poach them for a minute in acidulated water first to firm them enough to batter cleanly.
- "Rich batter"Usually a batter enriched with egg, thicker than a plain flour-and-water coating; the recipe gives no formula. A standard egg batter of 4 oz flour, one egg, and about 5 fl oz milk or beer, rested twenty minutes, does the job.
- Frying temperatureDeep fry at 350-375F. The roes are already delicate and cook through in two to three minutes; hotter fat browns the batter before the inside sets, cooler fat lets the coating absorb grease and slump.
- SeasoningBloaters carry some salt from the brine and smoke, though the cure is a light one, so the cayenne is doing most of the work and little or no further salt is usually wanted. Taste one before seasoning the rest.
- Yield and servingTwo or three roes a head is a reasonable allowance, though the recipe gives no quantity. It specifies watercress as the garnish; small hot plates or fingers of dry toast and a wedge of lemon are common additions. Eat them straight from the pan.
The savoury course sat between the sweet and the dessert in a formal Victorian and Edwardian dinner, and it was almost defiantly plain-flavoured: anchovy, cheese, kidney, marrow bones, and soft roes, all of them salty or peppery counterweights to what had come before. It was widely understood as an English peculiarity. Bloaters themselves are associated above all with Great Yarmouth, where the autumn herring fishery supported a large curing trade; the lighter, briefer smoke of the bloater, as against the harder cure of the red herring, made a fish that kept only a few days and so was eaten fresh and locally. Because bloaters were left whole and ungutted, the roes came free with the fish, and nineteenth-century cookery books give them recipes of their own — sometimes as a thrifty by-product, sometimes as a small delicacy in their own right.