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Cod Roe and Cream
Take a cooked cod roe, remove the skin, and pound the roe in a mortar. Add the juice of two lemons, and a little salt and cayenne. Boil all with a breakfast-cupful of cream, and thicken with a well-beaten egg. Serve on hot buttered toast. Probable cost, 10d.
A Victorian savoury that comes together in about ten minutes once the roe is cooked. The whole dish turns on the egg: after it goes in, the pan must not boil.
- The egg is the hingeOnce the beaten egg is stirred in, keep the mixture below a simmer and stir constantly until it coats the spoon. The instruction to "boil all" applies to the cream and roe only; boiling after the egg gives you curds in lemony liquid rather than a smooth cream.
- A breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup: reckon 8 to 10 fl oz, so roughly one generous US cup. Use double or heavy cream, which tolerates the acid and heat far better than single or light cream.
- Lemon and creamThe juice of two lemons is a lot of acid for one cup of cream. Add it off the heat at the end, or hold back half and taste, otherwise the mixture may split before the egg has a chance to bind it.
- Getting a cooked roeFresh cod roe is sold in season and is poached whole in salted, acidulated water for 20 to 30 minutes depending on size, then cooled before the skin peels away cleanly. Vacuum-packed or tinned cooked roe is already prepared and can be used straight from the pack.
- PoundingA mortar gives a coarse, slightly grainy paste, which suits the dish. A food processor works but goes to a smooth purée in seconds, so pulse rather than run it.
- SeasoningRoe, especially packaged roe, is already salty. Season at the end. Cayenne here is a Victorian savoury signature and should be assertive enough to be noticed.
- YieldA roe of around 8 to 10 oz with a cup of cream should fill four to six rounds of toast, enough for four as a savoury or two as a light lunch, though roes vary a good deal in size. Butter and toast the bread at the last moment; the mixture soaks in quickly.
- Probable costTenpence was a modest sum in late-Victorian terms for a dish that feeds several.
Cod roe was one of the cheapest protein foods in Victorian Britain, a by-product of the cod fisheries, and it turns up in nineteenth-century cookery books poached and sliced, fried in crumbs, potted, or, as here, pounded into a cream. The dish belongs to the savoury course, the small hot, salty, peppery mouthful served after the sweet at dinner or at the end of a substantial breakfast, a distinctly British habit that ran from roughly the mid-nineteenth century to the Second World War and gave us anchovy toast, devilled kidneys and Scotch woodcock alongside this. The formula -- a pounded base, enriched with cream, bound with egg, sharpened with acid and cayenne, and set on toast -- underlies a good many of the savouries in the book. The cost note of 10d is characteristic of Cassell's, which gave a probable cost for nearly every recipe so that a household could judge a dish before committing to it.