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Roes, Carp
Put the roes in a saucepan, with a little salt, cover them with vinegar and water in equal parts, simmer for a few minutes, then cut them up small. Mix with half their bulk of bread-crumbs, season with cayenne, grated lemon-rind, mixed herbs and salt, bind with beaten egg, and form into small cakes. Pour a little oiled butter over, and bake brown in a quick oven, or cook before the fire in a Dutch oven.
A Victorian way of turning soft fish roe into a savoury dish, and the method still works — the only tricky parts are the vocabulary and the very short poaching window.
- Firm the roe first, gentlyThe acidulated water sets the delicate membrane so the roe can be cut without collapsing into paste. "A few minutes" means just that: a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, which bursts the sacs, and no longer than needed or the roe goes dry and grainy.
- "A quick oven"A hot oven, roughly 400-450F. The roes have already been simmered, so the oven is chiefly there to brown the outside and set the egg binding; bake only until brown.
- "Oiled butter"Butter melted until it runs clear as oil. Cooks often let it stand and poured off the clear fat from the milky solids, which brings it close to clarified butter, but the term itself means no more than melted.
- "A Dutch oven" hereNot the cast-iron pot. In this period a Dutch oven was an open-fronted tin reflector stood before the fire; the modern equivalent is a hot broiler, turning the cakes once.
- Mixed herbsA dried blend, commonly parsley, thyme and marjoram, sometimes a little sage; proportions varied. A teaspoon dried, or a tablespoon chopped fresh parsley and thyme, suits this quantity.
- Sourcing the roeCarp roe is a special order from a fishmonger in most places. Roe from herring, shad or mackerel is far easier to find and can be treated the same way, though soft (male) roe is more delicate than the hard roe of a carp.
- Bread-crumbs and binding"Half their bulk" means by volume, not weight — the mixture should just hold a shape.
Roe cookery of this kind belongs to the Victorian habit of finding a use for every edible part of a fish. Carp were pond fish in Britain, kept in estate and monastic stew ponds from the later Middle Ages, and a fish that size yields a roe substantial enough to treat as a dish in its own right. The entry sits in a long alphabetical run of by-product recipes — roes, sounds, palates, cheeks — where the same technique appears again and again: poach the fragile thing to firmness, chop it, extend it with crumbs, bind with egg and brown it. Small savoury cakes like these could be served as a savoury, the salty course that closed a formal English dinner after the sweet, a habit that survived into the early twentieth century before largely disappearing.