Fried Roe
Cook the roe ten minutes in boiling salted water to which one tablespoon of vinegar has been added. Drain, roll it in beaten egg and then in cracker crumbs-season with salt and pepper, and fry until brown in hot fat.
WHITE-BAIT-Place the fish in a wire basket, dip for a moment in a pan of clear, cold water, shake to drain. well and turn out on a soft cloth to absorb partly the moisture. Sprinkle with flour or fine white corn meal until quite covered. Have ready a kettle of boiling hot fat, place a quantity of the fish in a frying basket and immerse them in the fat. They take but a moment to brown. Stir them in the basket while cooking, so they will not adhere to each other. Drain on soft yellow paper and keep very hot. See Sauces for Fish, etc. Serve with tartare sauce.
WHITING-Whitings are usually served skinned, egged and bread-crumbed, with tail in mouth and fried in hot fat. Serve on a napkin with fried parsley and anchovy sauce separately.
Three small fry-pan entries run together here: shad roe, whitebait and whiting. All three depend on fat hot enough to set the coating instantly, and on the fish going in dry.
- What "roe" means hereIn an American book of this period an unqualified roe usually means shad roe, sold as a paired sac in spring. Herring, cod or flounder roe behave much the same but are smaller and need less poaching.
- Poach before frying, and gentlyThe hinge of the dish. The recipe says ten minutes in boiling salted water, but the membrane traps steam and can burst at a rolling boil, so hold it at a bare simmer. Ten minutes suits a large pair; small sacs need rather less. Cool it before breading or the coating slides.
- The vinegarOne tablespoon in the poaching water firms the membrane and keeps the roe pale. It is not a flavouring and you will not taste it.
- Frying temperature"Hot fat" for these is best read as roughly 350-375F. Below that the crumb crust soaks; much above it and the coating colours before the roe has heated through.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs came from plain soda or water crackers, crushed fine. Unsalted saltines are the closest match; panko is coarser and gives a different, shaggier crust.
- WhitebaitIn British usage the word covered the fry of herring and sprat, netted in enormous numbers; American books applied it more loosely to other small fish. Fisheries rules on juvenile fish vary by country and some whitebait fisheries are now closed or quota-limited, so buy from a licensed fishmonger. Very small smelt or fresh anchovies fry the same way.
- Dry the whitebait properlyThe cold-water dip is only to separate the fish; the flour will not adhere to wet ones and wet fish spit violently in deep fat. Blot them, flour them, and shake off the surplus in a sieve. Thirty to sixty seconds in the fat is enough.
- "Soft yellow paper"Unbleached kitchen paper of the day. Paper towels or a rack over a tray.
- Whiting "with tail in mouth"The fish is curled and the tail pushed through or into the mouth before breading, a Victorian presentation sometimes called merlan en colere. Purely decorative; a straight fillet fries identically.
- YieldOne pair of shad roe serves one to two. Allow 4 oz of whitebait per person as a first course, 6 oz as a main.
Shad roe was a fixed point of the American spring table in the nineteenth century, when the shad runs up the Delaware, Hudson and Susquehanna supplied eastern cities in quantity, and cookbooks of the 1890s treat it as a seasonal certainty rather than a luxury. The whitebait entry belongs to a different tradition: the whitebait dinners held at Greenwich and Blackwall on the Thames, at which the tiny fish were floured, fried in seconds and eaten with brown bread and butter, were famous enough that American books carried the method without much explanation. That the Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a broad domestic readership, prints all three in a single run of type may hint at how it was used - perhaps less as a set of projects than as a reference to be consulted for whichever fish the market had that morning, though the typesetting alone cannot settle the question.