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Shad Roe Croquettes
4 shad roe 3 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt Juice of one lemon Few grates nutmeg Few grains cayenne 1 cup milk Boil the shad roe fifteen minutes in salted water, then drain and mash. Melt the butter, add the flour and seasonings, add the milk slowly, cook until thick and smooth. Mix the roe with the sauce, cool, shape and fry as directed.
A standard croquette panade doing duty for one of the shortest-lived seasonal ingredients in American cooking. The recipe assumes you already know the book's croquette method, which it does not repeat here.
- "Fry as directed"The book refers the reader back to its general croquette method, which is not repeated here. The usual period practice is to shape the cooled mixture, crumb it, dip in beaten egg, crumb again, and fry in deep fat until the crust colours. The interior is already cooked, so you are only setting the coating.
- Chilling is the hingeThe mixture must be cold and firm before shaping, not merely cool. Spread it in a shallow pan, press plastic or buttered paper on the surface, and refrigerate at least two hours. Warm croquette paste bursts in the fat.
- Boiling the roeFifteen minutes at a rolling boil will split the membrane and scatter the eggs. Bring the salted water to a bare simmer, slide the roe in whole, and hold it below a boil for the same fifteen minutes; a pair of roe sets firm in that time. Pricking the membrane in two or three places first helps it cook evenly. (The lemon juice is listed with the seasonings for the sauce, not for the water.)
- What a shad roe isA pair of egg sacs from a female American shad, sold joined by a membrane and weighing roughly 6 to 10 oz per pair. "4 shad roe" almost certainly means four pairs, giving well over a pound of mashed roe. Strip away the tough connecting membrane after cooking.
- SourcingShad runs are far smaller than they were a century ago and several Atlantic states have closed or restricted the fishery, so roe appears only briefly in spring and often frozen. Check what is legally landed where you are; substituting another firm cooked roe works with the same sauce.
- The sauceThree tablespoons butter to four of flour to one cup milk is a very stiff bechamel, and deliberately so. Cook it a full two minutes after it thickens to lose the raw flour taste, or the croquettes will taste pasty.
- Seasoning"Few grates" of nutmeg and "few grains" of cayenne are deliberately small, unmeasured amounts, a pinch at most. Both are meant to sit under the roe, not beside it.
- YieldThe book gives no yield. Four pairs of roe with a cup of sauce would make perhaps a dozen croquettes of the usual cone or cylinder shape.
Croquettes were the workhorse of the American entree course between about 1880 and the First World War, and cookbooks issued by flour milling companies had an obvious interest in them: every one begins with butter, flour and milk. Shad roe belonged to a narrow spring window when the fish ran up the Atlantic rivers to spawn, and in that season it appeared widely on the eastern seaboard, though it was prized as a delicacy even when the fish itself was abundant, poached, broiled with bacon, or bound into made dishes like this one. Its near-disappearance from ordinary markets is generally attributed to dams, pollution and heavy netting, which reduced the runs through the twentieth century until states began closing the fishery outright. A recipe that once treated four pairs of roe as an unremarkable purchase now reads as a small piece of evidence about how much the rivers held.