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Carp Roe
Put the roes of three or four carp into a stewpan, strew a little salt over them, and cover with vinegar. Boil them for ten or fifteen minutes, then chop them up with half their bulk in bread-crumbs, the finely-chopped rind of a lemon, a little salt and cayenne, and a little grated nutmeg. Make them up into cakes, and bake in a Dutch oven, with a little butter, till they are hot. Time to bake, a few minutes.
A Victorian way with a by-product: the roe is firmed in acidulated liquid, then bound and browned. The hinge is the boil — vinegar sets the roe so it can be chopped without turning to paste, and overcooking past that point makes it dry and chalky.
- Which roeCassell's does not distinguish, but hard roe (the eggs) is what holds together in cakes; soft roe, the milt, collapses into a cream. If your fishmonger offers a choice, take the hard roe. The yield from three or four carp depends entirely on the size and season of the fish, so judge the breadcrumbs by bulk as the recipe does rather than by weight.
- The vinegar boilCover with a mild vinegar or a half-and-half vinegar and water; ten to fifteen minutes is right for whole lobes of hard roe but far too long for thin soft roe, which needs about three. The roe is done when it is opaque and firm to a skewer.
- Dutch ovenIn Victorian British cookery books this usually means the open-fronted tin reflector set before the fire, not the lidded cast-iron pot. Since the cakes need only browning, a hot oven will stand in, or simply fry them in butter over medium heat until browned on both sides.
- "Till they are hot"Everything in the cake is already cooked, so this is a browning step only — five to eight minutes in the oven, or two or three minutes a side in the pan. Longer dries the roe out.
- BindingHalf the bulk of the roe in breadcrumbs is a lot, and the mixture can be crumbly with no egg. The recipe does not say which sort of crumb is meant; fresh soft crumb carries moisture, so if using dry packaged crumbs, cut back or add a beaten egg to bring the mixture together.
- SeasoningThe lemon rind, cayenne and nutmeg are doing real work against a muddy, slightly oily roe. Zest only, no pith, and be generous with the lemon.
- SourcingCarp roe is rarely sold at supermarkets. Ask a fishmonger who handles whole freshwater fish, or use grey mullet or cod roe, both of which behave the same way in this treatment.
Carp was the workhorse of European fishponds from the Middle Ages onward — a fish farmed at monasteries and manors precisely because it survived transport and stocking, and a fish eaten on fast days. That long history of pond-keeping meant carp came to the kitchen whole and in quantity, roe and all, and thrift dictated that the roe was not wasted. Recipes of this kind, firming roe in vinegar and then forcing it into cakes with crumbs and spice, appear across nineteenth-century British household books; the vinegar both sets the delicate eggs and cuts the earthiness that gave carp its reputation for tasting of the pond. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households, catalogued such uses alphabetically and without ceremony, on the assumption that a cook handed a whole fish should know what to do with every part of it.