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Shad-Roe-and-Yellow-Butter Sandwiches
¼ a pound of butter.
Sifted yolks of 4 eggs.
INGREDIENTS.
I set of shad roe, cooked, pounded in a mortar and sifted. ½ a teaspoonful of paprica. 4 drops of tobasco sauce. 2 teaspoonfuls of very finechopped capers.
Method. - Cream the butter and add the other ingredients gradually. Prepare as usual.
A compound butter, not a cooked filling: everything is folded into softened butter and spread on thin bread. The whole point is fineness of texture, so the sieving is not optional.
- The butter quantityThe amount has lost its fraction in this printing; the '14' is almost certainly a quarter pound (½ cup, 1 stick), which suits a set of roe and four yolks and gives a spreadable paste. Have it properly softened at room temperature rather than melted, or the mixture will separate.
- "One set of shad roe"Shad roe comes as a pair of joined lobes from a single fish; the weight varies with the fish, commonly somewhere between half a pound and a pound. That is one set. Buy it whole and intact; broken lobes leak and cook unevenly.
- Cooking the roe firstThe roe must be cooked before it goes near the butter. Poach the set gently in barely simmering salted water with a little lemon, roughly ten minutes or until firm through, then cool, peel away the membrane, and press the eggs through a fine sieve. Hard boiling bursts the sac and turns the grains dry and gritty.
- Sifted yolksThese are hard-cooked yolks, pushed through the same sieve. Four yolks from modern large eggs are about right; the whites are not used here.
- PaprikaHalf a teaspoon of ordinary sweet paprika, for color and a faint sweetness. Smoked paprika is not what is meant here and will overwhelm the roe.
- "Prepare as usual"Presumably thin slices of firm white bread, lightly buttered, spread with the mixture, closed, crusts trimmed, and cut into fingers or triangles.
- YieldPerhaps a dozen or so small tea sandwiches, depending on how thin they are cut. The butter is better brought back to spreading temperature than used cold.
- Sourcing todayShad roe is a short spring season on the Atlantic coast and increasingly scarce as shad runs have declined. Where it is unavailable, the same treatment works with cooked cod or herring roe, though the flavor is coarser.
Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties (1899) belongs to the moment when American hostesses discovered the small savory sandwich as an afternoon and late-supper food, and shad roe was exactly the kind of ingredient that suited it: brief in season, distinctly American, and expensive enough to signal effort. Shad ran up the Atlantic rivers each spring in enormous numbers through the nineteenth century, and the roe was prized in its own right, usually sauteed in butter with bacon. Pounding it in a mortar and sieving it into butter, with paprika, capers and a few drops of Tabasco, is the Boston cooking-school method applied to a river delicacy; "yellow butter" is simply the color the sieved yolks and roe give the finished spread. The runs have thinned badly since, which is why a dish that read as seasonal and ordinary in 1899 now reads as a luxury.