Baked Shad Roe
Drop the roe gently into salted boiling water, and let it boil twenty minutes, but not rapidly. Drain, and lay it on a buttered tin plate. Dredge the roe well with pepper and salt, spread soft butter over it, and lastly dredge plentifully with flour. Bake in the oven thirty minutes, during which time baste frequently with salt, pepper, water and butter, always dredging with flour after each basting.
A two-stage method — parboil, then bake — that reflects an era when shad roe was cheap, plentiful and cooked well past what we would now consider done. A few notes before you start.
- Keep the sacs intactThe hinge of the whole method is gentle heat. A hard boil bursts the membrane and the eggs scatter into the water, which is why the original insists on twenty minutes "but not rapidly." Slide the roe in, bring the water back to a bare shiver, and leave it alone.
- Prick the membraneNot in the original, but standard practice: pierce each sac two or three times with a needle before it goes into the water. Steam builds inside the sac as it heats and will split it otherwise.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe says only "bake in the oven." Around 350F suits the purpose here, since the roe is already cooked through and the baking is for colour and the flour crust.
- The total cooking timeTwenty minutes boiled plus thirty baked is roughly fifty minutes for an item that sets in a fraction of that. Modern recipes generally poach a pair of shad roe five to eight minutes and then finish them briefly. Cooked the full period, the eggs are likely to turn chalky and grainy.
- Repeated dredgingFlour after every basting builds a thick shell rather than a light one. If you want the effect, dredge once at the start and once mid-bake, and use the pan drippings for the last baste.
- "Buttered tin plate"A shallow plate of tin or tinned iron, of the kind used for pies. Any small ovenproof dish or a quarter sheet pan works; the point is that the roe sits flat and the basting liquid pools around rather than under it.
- Basting liquidSalt, pepper, water and butter is essentially a thin seasoned emulsion — about 1/4 cup water to 2 tablespoons melted butter is enough for two sacs.
- Sourcing and yieldOne pair of shad roe serves two. American shad is no longer the commonplace spring fish it was, and directed fisheries are closed or restricted along much of the Atlantic coast; roe now appears briefly in spring at good fishmongers, often frozen. Lemon and bacon are the traditional accompaniments.
Shad roe was a fixture of the American spring table from the colonial period into the mid-twentieth century, tied to the annual run of American shad up the Atlantic rivers — the Delaware, the Hudson, the Susquehanna, the Connecticut — where the fish were netted in enormous numbers on their way to spawn. The roe, sold in paired sacs, was cheap enough to be everyday food and rich enough to be treated as a delicacy, which is why a general household manual could carry it without comment or explanation; its readers knew what a shad roe was and when to expect it. The fish itself, notoriously full of fine bones, gave rise to the long planked and slow-baked preparations found elsewhere in books of this era. Overfishing, dams blocking the spawning rivers, and pollution reduced the runs sharply over the twentieth century, and what was once a seasonal commonplace is now an occasional and regional item.