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Broiled Shad's Roe
Wash a shad's roe in cold water, wipe it dry on a clean towel, place it between the bars of a double wire gridiron, thickly buttered, and broil until brown on both sides. When cooked serve it with butter, lemon juice and parsley, pepper and salt. A garnish of sliced cucumbers may be served with the broiled roe. A dish of mashed potatoes should also accompany it.
A four-line recipe that assumes you know shad roe, which is a large paired sac of eggs held in a thin membrane. Almost everything that can go wrong with it comes down to heat management.
- The hinge: moderate heat, or it burstsThe membrane traps steam, and a fierce broiler will split the sac and scatter the eggs into the fire. Keep the roe six inches or more from the element, and prick the membrane in three or four places with a needle or the tip of a paring knife before it goes on.
- Parboil first if you likeShad roe is often poached five to eight minutes in barely simmering salted water with a squeeze of lemon, then cooled, dried, and broiled only to colour it. This recipe skips that step, which works but demands a slower fire and a longer time on the grid.
- The double wire gridironA hinged wire broiler that clamps the food between two grids so it can be turned in one motion without breaking. A hinged fish basket over a grill, or a rack set on a sheet pan under the broiler, does the same job; the basket is genuinely better here, because the roe is fragile.
- TimingA pair of raw roes needs roughly six to eight minutes a side under a moderate broiler; parboiled roe needs three or four. Done means firm to the touch, opaque all through, and no pink liquid weeping at a cut. Undercooked roe is unpleasant, overcooked roe turns dry and chalky, and the window is not wide.
- Butter it heavilyRoe is lean and will stick to bare metal and dry on the surface. Butter the grids thickly as instructed and baste once during cooking.
- The finishButter, lemon juice, parsley, pepper and salt is maître d'hôtel butter in all but name. Mash softened butter with chopped parsley, lemon juice and seasoning, and let a spoonful melt over the hot roe at the table.
- YieldOne pair of roes, which is what comes out of a single fish, serves two as a main course. Allow a whole pair per person only if the roes are small.
- SourcingAmerican shad runs are much reduced and several states have closed or restricted the fishery, so the roe now appears only briefly in spring and mainly at good fish counters on the Atlantic seaboard. Buy it fresh, with the pair still joined and the membrane unbroken, and cook it the same day.
Shad roe was a fixture of the American spring table long before Oscar Tschirky wrote it into a cookbook. The American shad runs up East Coast rivers to spawn from late winter into May, and the fishery on the Hudson, the Delaware and the Chesapeake supplied New York markets in enormous quantity through the nineteenth century; the arrival of shad and its roe was a seasonal event announced in newspapers the way asparagus and soft-shell crabs were. That abundance is why a book like this can treat the roe so casually, with no note on where to get it or when. Overfishing, dams and pollution had cut the runs sharply by the middle of the twentieth century, and shad roe went from a cheap spring staple to a brief and expensive delicacy, which is roughly where it remains.