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Shad Roe Croquettes
2 cups cooked shad roe 2 egg yolks 1 tablespoon parsley 1 cup Croquette Sauce salt, pepper, cayenne lemon juice Cut shad roe in small pieces; add seasonings, sauce and yolks of eggs. Shape; dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs; fry.
A late-Victorian croquette in the standard form: a stiff bound paste, chilled, breaded twice, and deep-fried. The original assumes you already have the book's Croquette Sauce and cooked roe on hand.
- Croquette Sauce means a very thick white sauceA panada-style bechamel, on the order of 4 tablespoons each of butter and flour to 1 cup of milk in books of this period, though the book's own proportions should be checked where it gives them: stiff enough to mound on a spoon, not pourable. An ordinary thin white sauce will not hold the roe together and the croquettes are liable to burst in the fat.
- Chill the mixture before shapingThe recipe says only "Shape," but the paste must be spread on a plate and refrigerated until firm, an hour at least. This is the hinge: warm croquette paste will not take a coating and will split open in the oil.
- Cooking the roe firstBuy roe in intact pairs, poach gently in salted water with lemon for about 8-10 minutes until firm and opaque, then cool and pull away the tough connecting membrane before chopping. Two cups is roughly two good-sized pairs.
- Don't overcook the roeShad roe turns dry and grainy fast. Poach it just to set; it gets a second cooking in the fryer, and the eggs inside the sac are already fine-textured enough to go chalky.
- "Dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs"The three-stage coating is deliberate — dry crumbs first so the egg has something to grip, then beaten egg thinned with a spoon of water, then crumbs again. Rest the coated croquettes 20 minutes in the refrigerator before frying.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 375F, two or three croquettes at a time so the temperature holds. They need only 2-3 minutes to brown, since everything inside is already cooked.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper, cayenne and lemon juice are given without quantities. Season the paste assertively before chilling and taste it then — roe is bland and the crumb coating mutes it further. Cayenne here is a pinch, not a teaspoon.
- YieldAbout ten croquettes, serving four to five as an entree course. Serve with lemon and a little of the same sauce thinned with cream, or with brown butter.
Shad roe was one of the great seasonal luxuries of the American spring, and cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1920s treat it the way later ones treat asparagus: a brief, keenly awaited arrival to be used up in every possible form. American shad ran in enormous numbers up the Atlantic rivers he, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna hthe roe, sold in pairs, arrived in enough abundance to be turned into croquettes as well as sautéed plain. The croquette itself belongs to the fashionable French-inflected cookery that dominated American entrée courses in this period: almost anything cooked could be chopped, bound with a thick sauce and egg yolk, breaded and fried. The runs have since collapsed under dams and overfishing, and shad roe is now a short, expensive specialty rather than a spring commonplace.