Scalloped Roe
Boil as for fried roe, drain, and break the roe up lightly with a fork. Make a white sauce. Sprinkle a layer of roe in a baking-dish; add one-half the yolk of an egg, well beaten, dropping it over the top of the roe; next sprinkle lightly with finely chopped parsley; salt and pepper to taste and a few drops of lemon juice, and then add a layer of the white sauce. Repeat the layers of roe, egg, seasoning and sauce, cover with bread crumbs and bits of butter, and bake until brown. If a large dish is required, use with the roe any cold flaked fish left from a former meal. Various kinds of roe may be prepared the same as shad roe. 25 25
A layered gratin built from roe that has already been parboiled, in the manner of a fish scallop. The book assumes you have read the fried roe entry a few pages earlier, and it gives no quantities at all.
- "Boil as for fried roe" means parboilThe book's fried roe entry is not reproduced here, but the usual handling is to simmer the whole roe sacs gently in salted water, often with a little lemon juice or vinegar, for something like 10 to 15 minutes, then drain and cool before breaking them up. Keep the water at a bare tremble rather than a rolling boil so the membrane stays intact and the eggs do not burst out.
- Quantities to work fromQuantities to work from (the recipe gives none) -- Two pairs of shad roe, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb, with about 1 1/2 cups of white sauce, will fill a 1 1/2-quart dish and serve four. Scale the standard medium-thick roux of 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour per cup of milk to whatever quantity of sauce you make, so the layers hold.
- "Bake until brown"The book names no oven heat. A moderately hot oven, in the region of 400F for 20 to 25 minutes, will get the crumbs golden and the sauce bubbling at the edges. Apart from the egg yolk, everything in the dish is already cooked, so this is largely a browning step.
- The half egg yolkOne yolk split between the two layers, enriching the dish rather than garnishing it. Beat it well and drizzle it thinly; dropped in a blob it sets into a rubbery spot. It cooks through in the oven.
- Sourcing roeShad roe has a short spring season and is increasingly hard to find, with a number of Atlantic shad fisheries closed or restricted. Herring, cod or mullet roe take much the same treatment, as the recipe itself allows.
- The leftover fishCold flaked fish from a previous meal is used here to bulk out the dish. Keep it refrigerated, use it within a day or two, and make sure the assembled dish comes out of the oven hot all the way through rather than just browned on top.
- Season the roe, not just the sauceBoiled roe is bland and slightly livery. The salt, pepper, parsley and lemon are doing real work at every layer, and the lemon in particular cuts the richness; do not save it all for the top.
- The trailing numbersThe "25 25" at the end is a printing artifact of the original book's cross-reference or page system, not part of the recipe.
Shad roe was one of the great seasonal markers of the American spring table, and the roe sacs were sold in pairs, still joined. This is a scallop in the older sense of the word, meaning anything layered with sauce and crumbs and browned in a dish, and it belongs to the thrifty end of the fish chapter, where the point is stretching a small quantity of something good with white sauce and yesterday's cold fish. The Butterick Publishing Company sold sewing patterns and household guidance to a middle-class readership that was expected to cook well without waste, which is exactly the note struck by the instruction to bulk out the dish with fish "left from a former meal." Shad populations have since collapsed from their nineteenth-century abundance, so the recipe now reads as a small record of a fishery that no longer exists at that scale.