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ROES, SALTED (a substitute for Caviare)
The roes for this purpose should be taken from fish about to spawn. Wash the roes first in milk and water, and afterwards in cold water, and clear them perfectly from fibre. Drain them thoroughly, and sprinkle a quarter of a pound of salt upon each pound and a half of spawn. Let them lie in the brine for two days, turning them over occasionally. Lay them on a board placed in front of the fire, and distant about a yard from it, and let them remain for ten or twelve hours till they are quite dry. Crush them well with a weight, and press them into a perfectly dry jar. Put on each pound and a half of spawn twelve drops of spirit of nitre and as much pounded saltpetre as can be piled on a sixpence. Cover the jar with writing-paper upon which has been spread a thick coating of cold lard, tie a piece of wash-leather over this, and store the preparation in a warm place. It is used as a relish, and should be served spread thinly on bread and butter or toast.
This is an uncooked, ambient-temperature cure of raw fish roe using a non-food chemical and an unmeasured nitrate. It cannot be reproduced safely, and the points below explain why rather than how to fix it.
- Spirit of nitre is not a food ingredient"Spirit of nitre" in Victorian usage meant either sweet spirit of nitre (ethyl nitrite in alcohol) or, in some texts, nitric acid. Both were bought at the chemist's, neither has any place in a modern kitchen, and ethyl nitrite is a volatile, flammable vasodilator that was later withdrawn from medical use.
- The saltpetre dose is unmeasurable"As much pounded saltpetre as can be piled on a sixpence" is not a quantity. Potassium nitrate in curing is now controlled by weight against the weight of the food, precisely because both under-dosing and over-dosing carry real consequences, and nitrate levels in cured foods are legally capped.
- Raw roe never reaches a safe temperatureNothing in the method cooks the roe. It is then dried for ten or twelve hours in front of a fire at a temperature nobody is measuring, which may sit anywhere in the range where bacteria multiply.
- Anaerobic storage in a warm placeA pressed, sealed jar of low-acid fish protein kept deliberately warm is close to a textbook set-up for Clostridium botulinum, which is common in fish and fish guts and produces toxin without any smell or off flavour to warn you. The lard-and-paper seal excludes air; it does not exclude the hazard.
- ParasitesRaw roe taken straight from ungutted spawning fish may carry nematode larvae. Commercial raw-consumption fish products are frozen to specified temperatures for specified times to deal with this; salting alone is not a substitute.
- Historical measures, for reading onlyThe salting rate is a quarter of a pound to a pound and a half of roe, roughly 17 per cent by weight, which is very heavy. Wash-leather is chamois; writing-paper spread with cold lard was one of the usual improvised covers before waxed paper and screw-top lids.
- If you want the dishSalted and pressed roe is still made commercially and is sold as bottarga, avgotaracho or pressed cod roe. Buy it, or follow a current, tested recipe with weighed cure and controlled temperatures.
Caviare from the Caspian sturgeon fisheries reached British tables through the nineteenth century as an expensive imported luxury, and cookery writers responded, as they always do, with substitutes built from cheaper local material — here the roe of any fish taken on the point of spawning. The technique itself is far older than the imitation: salting and pressing roe into a dense, sliceable block is the basis of Mediterranean bottarga and Greek avgotaracho, both generally traced back to the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt well before the medieval period. What marks this version as Victorian is the trip to the chemist. Saltpetre and spirit of nitre were ordinary household purchases, kept for curing, medicine and cleaning alike, and here the dose is given by the sixpence rather than by weight. The entry belongs to the era when the savoury spread on toast — anchovy, potted meat, bloater paste — was a fixed part of breakfast and supper.