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Shad Roes, Blackford
Season all over two very fresh shad roes of one pound each with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika, then gently roll them in flour. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add the roes, one beside another, and fry for five minutes on each side or until a nice golden colour. Remove with a skimmer and lay on a lightly buttered baking dish.
Cut two peeled potatoes into small dice pieces, wash and drain well, then arrange around the roes. Finely chop six well-cleaned, fresh mushrooms, two branches chervil, one branch parsley, half bean sound garlic, three shallots and half a green pepper. Sprinkle this mixture evenly over the roes, season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, moisten with a gill white wine and half gill water; cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, set on the range for two minutes, then set to bake in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove, divide a half ounce fresh butter in small bits over the roes, squeeze the juice of a quarter lemon over all and serve.
A shad roe recipe in the Delmonico manner: fry, then finish in the oven under a butter-and-wine blanket of chopped aromatics. The measurements are turn-of-the-century and the oven temperature is left to the cook.
- The hinge: don't overcook the roeA pair of one-pound roes given ten minutes in the pan plus thirty in the oven will come out firm and chalky by current taste. The browning is the point of the frying stage; sear until golden but barely set, and count on the oven stage to finish it. Roe is done when just firm to the touch, still moist at the centre.
- Prick the membranes firstShad roe sacs are held in a tight membrane that traps steam and can burst in hot fat. Pierce each lobe in several places with a needle or the tip of a knife before flouring, and keep the heat moderate.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the book uses no oven term here at all. For a covered dish of this kind, a moderate oven of around 350F is a reasonable modern reading.
- A gill and a saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the moistening is 1/2 cup white wine plus 1/4 cup water. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon; two saltspoons of white pepper is 1/2 teaspoon, which is assertive but deliberate.
- "Half bean sound garlic"An ambiguous phrase even in its own day - most plausibly half a clove, "sound" meaning unblemished. Half a clove, finely chopped, is in keeping with the rest of the seasoning; anything more will dominate the roe.
- The potatoesRaw diced potato will not cook through in thirty minutes at 350F unless the dice are genuinely small, about 1/4 inch. Cut them fine, or parboil for three minutes before arranging them around the roes.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche, not a lid: a round of buttered parchment laid directly on the surface, which keeps the roes from drying while letting the wine reduce. Parchment does the job exactly; foil traps too much steam.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. A little flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves gives the same faintly aniseed lift.
- Sourcing and yieldShad roe is a short spring season and Atlantic shad fisheries are closed or restricted in many states, so supply is limited and often frozen; ask a fishmonger in March and April. Two roes of a pound each serve four as a main course.
Shad roe was a fixed spring event in East Coast American kitchens: the shad ran up the Delaware, Hudson and Connecticut rivers to spawn, and the roe sacs of the females were prized far above the bony flesh. The finished-in-the-oven treatment here - fry, cover with a fine chopped mixture of mushroom, shallot and herbs, moisten with white wine, seal under buttered paper - is essentially a duxelles-and-wine gratin borrowed from French practice and applied to a wholly American fish, which is what much of this book is doing. The name is the period's habit of dedicating a dish to a patron, a colleague or a place; such attributions in restaurant cookery of the 1900s are conventional and usually undocumented, and the recipe itself tells us nothing further about who Blackford was. Shad runs have since collapsed under damming, pollution and overfishing, so a dish that once signalled the arrival of spring in every market is now an occasional luxury.