Home › Diet for Under-Nourished Adults › Shad Roe
Shad Roe
Shad roe may be baked, broiled or fried. To broil, wipe with wet cloth, dry, sprinkle with salt and pepper, place on greased wire broiler, cook for five minutes on each side. Serve with Maitre d'Hotel butter. Roe may be rolled in flour, egg and bread crumbs and fried in deep fat. If served alone allow 1 roe to each serving.
A terse set of three methods for one seasonal ingredient. The broiling times assume small, thin roe sets and a coal-fired broiler; most roe sold today needs gentler handling.
- Keep the membrane intactA roe set is a pair of lobes in a thin sac. Puncture it over direct heat and it bursts, spattering violently and drying out. Handle it as a single unit, turn it with a spatula rather than tongs, and prick it once or twice with a needle before cooking to vent steam.
- Parboil first for thick setsFive minutes a side suits a pair of thin lobes only. For the heavy sets common now, poach them 5 to 8 minutes in barely simmering salted water with a squeeze of lemon, drain, cool, then broil or fry. This is standard practice and keeps the interior from staying raw while the outside toughens.
- Broiler distanceSet the rack so the roe sits about 4 inches from the element, on a greased rack over a pan. Cook until firm and just opaque through the thickest lobe; overcooking turns it grainy and chalky.
- Maitre d'Hotel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, chilled and sliced. Roughly 4 tablespoons butter, a tablespoon of parsley and two teaspoons of lemon juice serves four.
- Deep fryingFlour, then beaten egg, then crumbs; fry at 350 to 365F for 3 to 4 minutes if the roe was parboiled, longer if not. Drain on paper, salt while hot.
- SourcingShad roe is a brief spring item, and commercial shad fishing is closed or tightly limited in several Atlantic states. Frozen sets are widely sold; thaw in the refrigerator overnight and pat very dry before cooking.
- YieldOne set per person as a main course, as the original says. Half a set is ample as a first course, and bacon is the traditional accompaniment, its fat used for the pan version.
Shad roe was one of the great seasonal luxuries of the American Atlantic coast, arriving with the spring runs up the Hudson, Delaware and Connecticut rivers and disappearing again within weeks. Fish roe is dense in protein, fat, iron and B vitamins, and early twentieth-century dietary writing often recommended organ meats, liver and roe as concentrated "building" foods for patients who needed calories in small volume. The Maitre d'Hotel butter is a French preparation of parsley and lemon butter that had become common enough in American cookbooks by this period that authors named it without explaining it. The sharp decline of shad stocks later in the century turned what was once a cheap river fish into an expensive rarity.