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Shad Roe Salad
Marinate two cups each of cucumber and cooked shad Chill one hour; add one half cup mayonnaise. Arrange in salad bowl; garnish with marinated slices of cucumber and crisp lettuce leaves. Sprinkle the slices of cucumber with chopped chives.
A spare, telegraphic recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century American cookbooks, where a reader was assumed to know what "marinate" meant without being told. Two things need filling in: the marinade and the roe itself.
- What "marinate" means hereIn books of this period an unqualified instruction to marinate a salad ingredient usually meant to dress it with French dressing — commonly about three parts oil to one of vinegar, salted and peppered — and let it stand; the recipe itself does not say. Something like a third of a cup for four cups of solids is a safe starting point, and drain off what has not been absorbed before the mayonnaise goes in, or the salad will be loose.
- Roe versus fleshThe title says roe, the text says "cooked shad." Either works, but they behave differently: a pair of shad roe sacs, poached and broken into pieces, will give roughly two cups depending on their size. Flaked cooked shad fillet is milder and holds its shape better in a dressed salad.
- Cooking the roeWhole roe sacs are poached, not boiled — barely trembling salted water with a squeeze of lemon, 8 to 10 minutes for a medium pair, then cooled and the connective membrane slipped away. A hard boil bursts the sac and the eggs scatter.
- Salting the cucumberPeel, seed and slice, then salt lightly and drain 20 to 30 minutes before dressing. Untreated cucumber sheds water into the mayonnaise during the hour of chilling and the dressing breaks down to a thin film.
- MayonnaiseThe half cup intended here would have been homemade; some commercial mayonnaise is thicker and sweeter. If yours is, thin it with a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar and add no sugar.
- YieldFour cups of dressed solids serves four as a first course, or three as a lunch plate.
- Sourcing shadAmerican shad is now under harvest restriction or outright moratorium in a number of Atlantic states, and the roe season is short — late winter into spring. Ask what is legal and landed locally; frozen roe is sold, and its texture after poaching is noticeably softer.
Shad ran up the Atlantic rivers in enormous numbers each spring, and for generations of Eastern households the arrival of shad and its roe marked the turn of the year as reliably as any calendar. The roe — two joined sacs of fine eggs — was the prized part, usually parboiled and then sautéed in butter with bacon, and cookbooks of the 1890s through the 1920s carry it in every guise, including cold in salads like this one. Lowney's book, published by a Massachusetts chocolate company to promote its cocoa, nonetheless carries a full general cookery section, and its salad chapter reflects the period's enthusiasm for mayonnaise-bound composed salads served in a bowl lined with lettuce. The runs themselves collapsed over the twentieth century under dams, pollution and overfishing, which is why a dish once considered thoroughly ordinary now reads as a delicacy.