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Shad Roes, Newburgh
Plunge two shad roes of a pound and a quarter each in a quart of boiling water, with a teaspoon salt and two tablespoons vinegar, and boil ten minutes; lift them up, drain on a cloth and cut in one-inch pieces. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, carefully place in the pieces one beside another, without breaking them, and fry for two minutes on each side. Pour in two tablespoons sherry, one tablespoon brandy, one gill milk, a half gill cream, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Gently toss them and let slowly boil for ten minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with a quarter gill cream and add to the roes; shuffle the pan while heating without boiling for two minutes, place in a chafing dish or soup tureen and serve.
A Newburg sauce built on shad roe rather than lobster, from the brief spring season when roe shad ran up the Atlantic rivers. The cooking times are generous by current standards and the finish is the part that needs attention.
- The hinge: the yolk liaisonOnce the two yolks and cream go in, the pan must not come back to a boil or the sauce will curdle into scrambled egg. Take the pan off direct heat, stir in the diluted yolks, and return it to the lowest possible heat only until it thickens enough to coat a spoon.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one gill milk is 1/2 cup, half a gill cream is 1/4 cup, and a quarter gill is 2 tablespoons. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: the recipe calls for a full 1/2 teaspoon cayenne, which is aggressive by modern palates — start with a quarter of that and adjust.
- Cooking timesTen minutes of parboiling plus two minutes a side plus ten minutes simmering will leave the roe dry and chalky. Shad roe is essentially cooked through after the initial poach; a shorter blanch, a brief sear, and only a minute or two for the sauce to come together will treat it better.
- Prick the membraneShad roe sacs burst under heat and spit hot fat and eggs. Pierce each lobe in several places with a needle or the tip of a knife before it goes into the water, and keep the poaching liquid at a bare shiver rather than a rolling boil.
- SourcingAmerican shad roe appears in fish markets from late winter to spring, usually sold as paired lobes. A pair weighing a pound and a quarter each is very large by today's standard — most pairs run 6 to 12 ounces total, so scale the sauce down or buy several pairs.
- Melted butter"One and a half tablespoons melted butter" means the measure before melting matters little; use enough to film the pan. Clarified butter or a little neutral oil added to the butter will keep it from browning during the sear.
- ServingThe quantities suggest something like four servings as a lunch or supper dish, though the recipe gives no yield. A chafing dish keeps it warm without further cooking, which is the point -- reheating a yolk-thickened sauce over direct heat will break it. Toast points or plain rice absorb the sauce.
Newburg sauce — sherry, brandy, cream and egg yolks — is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, where it was first served as lobster à la Wenberg for a shipping captain named Ben Wenberg; the story goes that after a falling-out the name was scrambled into Newburg. Whatever the truth of that, the formula quickly detached from lobster and was applied to crab, scallops, oysters and, as here, shad roe. Shad was once so abundant in the Hudson, Delaware and Chesapeake that it counted as cheap food, and the roe was the spring delicacy that came with it — a brief season that cookbooks of this era treated as an event. Overfishing and dammed rivers cut the runs sharply through the twentieth century, and shad roe is now a specialty item rather than a seasonal commonplace.