Roe
The roe of the sturgeon-caviare, the roe of the grey mullet-botargo, and the dried and smoked roe of the cod, are prepared delicacies which belong to the shops. These too are all hard roes. It is with the soft roes-the milt, the laitance that the cook has to do.
Ragoût of Soft Roes. - A favourite relish of the French kitchen. See Relish No. 8.
Erasmus' Soup. - The great scholar had a taste, and his name is given to a soup in which the soft roes figure. Take ten soft roes of the herring, and cook them for ten minutes in water, salt, and a little vinegar. Then pass them into salt and water for a time, to get rid of the vinegar taste. Drain them, cut them in two, and heat them up in a sufficient quantity of clear broth or double broth, either with a quart of young peas or with crusts of bread and a spoonful of blanched and chopped fennel.
Roe Toast. Slices of buttered toast with the soft roes of fresh bloaters arranged upon them. 1
Two workable dishes sit inside this reference entry: a herring-milt soup in broth and a savoury toast. Both hinge on getting soft roe, which is the awkward part today.
- Soft roe means miltLaitance, milt and soft roe are the same thing: the sperm sacs of the male fish, creamy and fragile, as opposed to the granular hard roe used for caviare and botargo. Herring milt is sold frozen by some fishmongers and Asian and Eastern European grocers; cod milt is the usual substitute.
- Ten minutes is too longHerring milt sets in two to three minutes in barely trembling liquid and turns grainy and chalky beyond that. Poach until just firm, then treat the second heating in the broth as a warming through, not a second cooking.
- The vinegar stepThe acid firms the delicate sacs so they hold their shape when cut; the plain salted water afterwards is there only to pull the sharpness back out. A tablespoon of vinegar per litre of water is enough, and the resting in salt water need be no more than five minutes.
- Double brothBroth strengthened by being cooked a second time with fresh meat, so richer and clearer than plain stock. A good clear chicken or veal stock, reduced a little and skimmed clean, is the intended effect.
- A quart of young peasThe recipe does not say whether the quart is measured in the pod or shelled. A quart of pods shells down to only about a cupful, roughly 150 g; if shelled peas are meant, a quart is nearer 500 g. Frozen petits pois work and want only a minute or two in the broth.
- BloatersA bloater is a whole herring, ungutted, lightly salted and cold-smoked, which is why its roe was easy to come by in a Victorian kitchen. Cold smoking does not cook the fish, so the roes should be floured and fried in butter, or grilled, before they go on the toast; the recipe as printed does not say so.
- FennelBlanched and chopped fennel here means the feathery herb fennel, not the bulb. Thirty seconds in boiling water dulls its aniseed edge; a tablespoon chopped is a spoonful in the old sense.
- YieldTen herring roes and a quart of peas in broth makes a first course for four. Roe toast is one or two roes per slice, served hot as a savoury at the end of dinner.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), written anonymously by the journalist Eneas Sweetland Dallas under the name of the Soho restaurateur Auguste Kettner, is arranged as an alphabetical dictionary, which is why an entry on roe opens with a paragraph of shop-bought delicacies before it condescends to give directions. The soup honours Desiderius Erasmus, who wrote at length about fish-day eating in his colloquy Ichthyophagia, and dishes named for him are generally traced to that reputation rather than to any recipe he left; the attribution is the sort of learned flourish Dallas enjoyed. Soft roe itself was cheap, abundant and quintessentially English at the table's end: bloater and herring milt on toast belonged to the run of hot savouries that closed a Victorian dinner, alongside anchovy toast and devilled kidneys, and it faded with the herring fishery and with the savoury course itself.