Shad Roe
Shad roe may be baked, broiled or fried. To broil, wipe dry; sprinkle with pepper and salt and cook five minutes on each side. Butter well and stand in the oven for a few minutes; then serve garnished with parsley and lemon. To fry, proceed as with fish, but cook the roe for ten minutes first in boiling water.
A terse set of directions that assumes the cook already knows what shad roe looks like and how fragile it is. The details left unsaid are the ones that decide whether the roe comes out creamy or bursts across the pan.
- Handle the sac wholeRoe comes as a pair of lobes joined by a thin membrane, and that membrane is under pressure. Keep the pair intact, handle it gently, and prick the sac in several places with a needle before any heat touches it so steam escapes instead of splitting it open.
- Parboil is worth doing for broiling tooThe recipe only calls for the ten-minute boil before frying, but a gentle poach — barely trembling water, acidulated with lemon, for about ten minutes — firms the sac for every method and makes it far easier to move without breaking. Drain and pat dry before it goes near the broiler.
- Five minutes a side is for a hot broilerThat timing assumes a proper broiling flame close to the food. Under a modern overhead element, set the rack about four inches down and expect five to seven minutes a side on an unparboiled pair; a parboiled one needs only three or four to colour.
- The oven finishThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'a few minutes' in the oven. A moderate oven, around 350F, for five minutes or so is enough to set the centre through without driving off more moisture. Butter it well first, as directed; the roe has almost no fat of its own.
- DonenessCooked roe is opaque, greyish-pink and firm but still yielding, around 145F at the thickest point. Past that it turns dry and granular, which is the usual complaint about shad roe and almost always a matter of a few minutes too many.
- "Proceed as with fish"This refers the cook back to the book's own directions for frying fish, which in period practice generally means a dredge (seasoned flour, or egg and crumbs) and frying until browned on both sides. After the ten-minute boil the roe is nearly cooked, so the frying is largely for colour -- two to three minutes a side.
- SourcingAmerican shad runs have declined sharply and several historic fisheries have been closed or heavily restricted, so roe is a short, expensive spring item where it is available at all. Frozen roe exists and is acceptable; thaw it slowly in the refrigerator, which treats the sac more gently than a fast thaw.
- Yield and accompanimentOne pair of lobes serves two as a main course. The parsley and lemon are the period garnish; bacon and its rendered fat are the other traditional pairing, and the salt and smoke suit the mineral richness of the roe.
Shad roe belonged to a specific few weeks of spring along the Atlantic seaboard, when American shad (Alosa sapidissima, the specific name means "most delicious") ran up the Delaware, the Hudson, the Susquehanna and the Connecticut to spawn. Philadelphia, where the Fryer books were produced, sat at the centre of the Delaware shad trade, and planked shad and shad roe were seasonal fixtures on local menus and in local cookbooks — which is why this entry can be so brief. Any cook reading it would have seen roe sold in the market by the pair and known roughly what to do with it. The fish is bony enough that the roe was often prized above the flesh. The runs supported a large commercial fishery through the nineteenth century; dams, pollution and overfishing cut the catch drastically over the following century, and roe that was once a cheap spring commonplace is now a scarce luxury.