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Roe Sauce
Boil or fry the roes of any fish--both hard and soft roes may be used--sieve them, and add a good seasoning of salt and pepper, a little mixed mustard, and French vinegar. Stir two table-spoonfuls of the mixture thus prepared into a pint of plain white sauce or melted butter, and serve with the fish from which the roes were taken. A few drops of essence of anchovies will be found useful to heighten the flavour.
A thrifty Victorian sauce built on the roe of the fish you are already serving, and one that stands or falls on the smoothness of the sieved roe. Little here has changed except the vocabulary.
- Hard and soft roeHard roe is the egg mass of the female; soft roe (milt) is the male's sperm sac, sold as laitance. Soft roe purées to a smooth cream; hard roe (herring or shad roe, for instance) stays granular and needs firmer work through the sieve, or a short blitz followed by sieving.
- "Melted butter"In English cookery of this period melted butter is not simply butter warmed through: it is a flour-thickened butter sauce, butter and flour cooked together and let down with water or fish stock, the proportions varying from cook to cook. Plain white sauce is the same idea made with milk. Either gives you a body the roe can be suspended in.
- A pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, a little under 2½ US cups. Two tablespoons of roe purée into that quantity is a light seasoning; more can be added if you want a sauce that tastes distinctly of roe.
- Mixed mustardPrepared mustard, meaning English mustard powder slaked with water and left ten minutes to develop its heat. Ready-made English mustard from a jar is the direct equivalent; Dijon will read sweeter and softer.
- French vinegarA wine vinegar, most often white. It is there to cut the fat of the butter sauce, so add it by the teaspoon and taste as you go.
- Essence of anchoviesA thin, salty Victorian bottled condiment. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or Worcestershire sauce, does the same job; either brings its own salt, so season the sauce last.
- Heat controlOnce the roe purée goes in, keep the sauce below a simmer. Roe is protein and will curdle into grains in a boiling sauce, which no amount of whisking will undo.
- YieldA pint of sauce serves six to eight generously alongside a whole baked or poached fish. The roes of one or two herring, or a single shad roe, give more than the two spoonfuls called for.
Roe sauces of this kind were served with herring, shad, mackerel and cod in nineteenth-century British kitchens. The base — flour-thickened melted butter sharpened with mustard, vinegar and anchovy — is the same skeleton behind a number of Victorian fish sauces, and bottled anchovy essence of the kind named at the end was a common household condiment of the era.