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Creamed Shad-Roe with Mushrooms
Parboil a large shad-roe for two or three minutes, and plunge it in cold water. Drain and break it in small pieces and saute in butter until brown. Add while in the pan 1 cup of cream, salt, and pepper, and 1/2 cup of mushrooms cut in small pieces and stewed for fifteen minutes. Rub a teaspoonful of flour with a little of the cold cream until smooth; stir this in and let it boil up, stirring carefully, without breaking the roe more than necessary. Serve very hot.
A simple pan sauce built around shad roe, which cooks in minutes and is ruined by more. The recipe assumes you know that roe comes as a paired sac joined by a membrane.
- The hinge: brief heatRoe eggs seize and turn granular and dry if held long over heat. The two- to three-minute parboil is only to firm the sacs enough to handle; the sauté should brown them and no more, and the final boil-up is a matter of seconds once the flour thickens.
- Prick the sacsWhole roe sacs trap steam and can pop and spatter in hot butter. Pierce the membrane in several places before it goes in the pan, though here the recipe has you parboil and break the roe up first in any case.
- Parboil, then shockKeep the water at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, which risks tearing the membrane; the recipe itself specifies neither salt nor simmer. The cold-water plunge stops the carryover cooking and firms the sacs so they separate from the connecting tissue more easily.
- "Stewed for fifteen minutes"Longer than modern practice for mushrooms; it most likely means simmered in a little butter or water until soft and their liquid has gone. Sliced cultivated mushrooms need only 6 to 8 minutes; drain them so the water does not thin the cream.
- CreamHeavy cream works best here: a cup reduces and coats, while light cream or half-and-half is likelier to stay thin, and a single teaspoon of flour is not much insurance.
- The flour slurryMix the flour with cold cream held back from the cup, not with warm liquid, or it will lump. One teaspoon to a cup of cream gives a thin nappe, not a gravy.
- SourcingAmerican shad roe has a short spring season and is regulated differently from state to state; some Atlantic fisheries are closed. Buy it fresh from a fishmonger who can tell you where it came from, and cook it the day you get it. Frozen roe tends to weep and break up.
- YieldOne large shad roe pair with this much sauce serves two as a main course, or four on toast points as a first course. Serve on buttered toast, which absorbs the cream.
Shad ran up the Atlantic rivers in enormous numbers each spring, and the roe was for a long time the more prized part of the fish, often fetching higher prices than the bony flesh. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks treat it as a seasonal luxury, usually broiled or fried with bacon; creaming it with mushrooms, as here, is the sort of treatment associated with chafing-dish and hotel cookery, though the reasons a cook chose it are not recorded. The runs collapsed over the twentieth century through damming, pollution and overfishing, and shad roe has gone from a spring commonplace to a specialty item.