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Broiled Shad Roe
Wipe, sprinkle with salt and pepper, put on greased wire broiler, and broil five minutes on each side. Serve with Maître d'Hôtel Butter. Mackerel roe are delicious cooked in this way.
Broiled Pompano with Fricassee of Clams Clean and broil fish as directed in Ways of Cooking Fish (see p. 160). When nearly cooked, slip from broiler onto a hot platter and brush over with melted butter. Surround with two borders of mashed potatoes, one-inch apart, forced through a pastry bag and tube. Arrange ten halves of clamshells between potato borders, at equal distances; fill spaces between shells with potato roses. Place in oven to finish cooking fish and to brown potatoes. Just before serving, fill clam-shells with Fricassee of Clams. Clean one pint clams, finely chop hard portions and reserve soft portions. Melt two tablespoons butter, add chopped clams, two tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually one-third cup cream. Strain sauce, add soft part of clams, cook one minute, season with salt and cayenne, and add yolk of one egg slightly beaten.
Two recipes have run together on this page: a four-line treatment of shad roe, and a much more elaborate broiled pompano with clam fricassee that belongs to the era of pastry-bag garnishing. Both are workable, but each needs a note.
- Handle the roe set wholeA shad roe comes as a paired sac in a thin membrane that bursts and spits when it hits direct heat. Leave the pair intact, oil it well, and prick the membrane in two or three places before broiling; many cooks poach the set gently for five minutes in salted water with a little lemon first, then broil, which gives a set interior without a scorched exterior.
- Five minutes a side is for a small setThat timing suits a thin roe under a hot broiler about four inches from the element. A large set, an inch thick at the middle, will still be raw and grainy in the center at that time. Cook until the interior is uniformly opaque and firm to a fingertip, roughly 145F.
- Maitre d'hotel butterButter creamed with lemon juice, chopped parsley, salt and pepper, then chilled and sliced. Fannie Farmer's proportions elsewhere in the book are about a quarter cup butter to a teaspoon lemon juice and a tablespoon parsley.
- YieldOne set of shad roe serves one generously or two as a first course. The pompano recipe gives neither the size of the fish nor the number of servings; a pint of shucked clams and the fricassee below would dress a single whole pompano for a small table.
- "One pint clams"Shucked clams with their liquor, not clams in the shell. Roughly a pint of shucked meats equals about three dozen small hard-shell clams, and you will need the shells anyway for the garnish.
- The egg yolk goes in off the heatThis is the hinge of the fricassee. Once the yolk is stirred in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will curdle into threads. Take the pan off the burner, temper the yolk with a spoonful of hot sauce, stir it back, and serve.
- The soft parts cook one minute onlyClam bellies toughen fast. The hard portions are chopped and cooked into the sauce base for flavor; the soft parts go in at the very end for exactly as long as the recipe says.
- Oven for the potato bordersThe recipe says only 'place in oven'; a hot oven, in the region of 425F for eight to ten minutes, is enough to color the piped potato without drying the fish. Duchess potato, stiffened with egg yolk, holds its shape through a pastry bag far better than plain mashed.
- SourcingShad roe appears for a few weeks in spring on the East Coast and is worth waiting for; mackerel roe, as the book notes, takes the same treatment. American shad stocks have declined sharply and several state fisheries are closed, so buy from a reputable fishmonger. Pompano is a Gulf and South Atlantic fish; red snapper or striped bass fillets broil similarly.
Shad roe was the great spring luxury of the American Atlantic seaboard, and its brief season -- the run of Alosa sapidissima up the Hudson, Delaware and Connecticut rivers from March into May -- was treated in nineteenth-century cookbooks the way asparagus and the first strawberries were. Fannie Farmer's book, first published in 1896 out of the Boston Cooking School, gives it only four lines; what she supplies is the timing and the butter. The pompano recipe that follows is a different animal entirely: a restaurant plate transcribed for the home, with its piped potato borders, its ten clamshells set at equal distances, and its egg-thickened fricassee. That kind of architectural garnishing came into American cooking from French professional practice.