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Roes of Fish, for Garnishing
Take the roes of fresh salmon, cod, or other large fish, wash them well to clear them from fibre, and set them on a tin plate in a cool oven until quite dry. Beat them with a fork to separate the seeds, put these into a bottle, and store in a cool dry place. They will keep good for some time. A spoonful sprinkled lightly over white fish will improve its appearance.
This is a garde-manger trick rather than a dish: dried fish eggs kept in a bottle and scattered over pale fish as a finishing garnish. As written it is a shelf-stable low-acid fish preparation with no measured temperature, time or moisture target, and it should not be reproduced.
- Why this one failsRaw fish roe dried at an unspecified low temperature and then bottled is the kind of low-acid, low-oxygen animal product in which Clostridium botulinum spores can survive, and can grow if the roe has not in fact dried through. Nothing in the method brings the roe to a bactericidal temperature, and nothing verifies that it has dried enough to be safe; the direction to keep it in a cool dry place reduces the hazard without removing it.
- "Until quite dry" is not a specificationSafe drying of a protein this wet depends on reaching a known water activity, which cannot be judged by whether the eggs crumble under a fork. Traditional dried roes such as bottarga get there by heavy salting first; this recipe uses no salt at all.
- Fat and ranciditySalmon and cod roe are rich in highly unsaturated oil. Even a batch that dried properly would oxidise in a bottle on a shelf, turning fishy and bitter, most likely well before the book's "some time" is up.
- What the oven language meantFor reference only: a Victorian "cool oven" is roughly 200-250F, the residual heat of a range after baking. That is a drying temperature, not a cooking one, which is precisely the problem here.
- "Seeds"The period term for the individual eggs within the roe sac. The membrane and connective "fibre" the recipe wants washed away is the sac itself.
- If you want the effectCured salmon roe (ikura) and pressed cod roe sold chilled give the same scatter of colour over white fish, and are produced under controlled salt and temperature. For any home-cured or dried roe, follow a current tested recipe.
Cassell's belongs to the era when the appearance of a dish carried nearly as much weight as its flavour, and it turns here to the roe that a fishmonger would otherwise have thrown in for nothing. Cod roe in particular was cheap and abundant in Britain through the nineteenth century, sold boiled and sliced as working-class food, so turning it into a decorative powder for turbot or sole was a piece of thrift dressed as refinement. Drying and grating fish roe is an old Mediterranean habit as well, seen in bottarga and Greek avgotaracho, though those depend on a hard salt cure that this recipe conspicuously omits. The instruction is only to use a cool oven, but it is tempting to read that as the residual warmth of a coal range: heat that had been paid for once was expected to do a second job on its way out.