Home › Fish › Sandwich (Marinate one cup each)
Sandwich (Marinate one cup each)
Marinate one cup each of cucumber and cooked shad-roe, and a dash of mayonnaise and place on a crisp lettuce leaf between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.
A brief entry, written for cooks who already knew what shad roe was and how to poach it. Two points need filling in before it works: what the marinade is, and how to keep the sandwich from going wet.
- The marinade is unstated"Marinate" in a recipe this terse most likely meant a simple oil-and-acid dressing (oil, vinegar or lemon juice, salt and pepper) for a short steeping, but the original gives no ingredient, quantity or time. Treat it as the cook's discretion rather than a lost instruction.
- Shad roe has to be cooked firstThe recipe takes cooked roe as a given. A pair of lobes is normally poached gently in salted water with a little lemon for about 10 minutes, then cooled and the membrane removed before the eggs are broken up. Roe that boils hard bursts and turns dry and grainy.
- Sourcing shad roeAmerican shad is seasonal and spring-run, and far less common at fish counters than it was when this was written; a number of Atlantic-coast fisheries have been closed or restricted. Buy it in spring where it is legally sold, or substitute another firm cooked roe.
- Salt the cucumberPeel, seed and dice the cucumber, toss it with salt, and let it drain about 20 minutes before dressing it. Undrained cucumber can release enough water to soak through thin white bread.
- "A dash of mayonnaise"Enough to bind — a tablespoon or two for the two cups of filling. More than that and the marinade and the mayonnaise fight each other.
- Bread and assemblyThin-sliced white sandwich bread, buttered to the edges, is doing structural work here: the butter seals the crumb against the dressing. Assemble shortly before serving.
- YieldTwo cups of filling makes about six to eight sandwiches cut in halves, or two dozen small tea-sized triangles with the crusts removed.
Shad roe was a familiar spring commodity in American cities well into the twentieth century — the shad run up the Hudson, Delaware and Susquehanna was heavy, and the roe appeared on menus from March through May as a matter of course, though the roe itself was prized in nineteenth-century markets even while the fish was abundant. The pairing with cucumber follows the standard logic of the period's fish sandwiches, where something cool and acid was set against an oily, strongly flavoured protein. Overfishing, dams and pollution had reduced the runs sharply by the later twentieth century, and shad roe went from ordinary to seasonal luxury — one of the clearer cases of a book like this preserving a food's older status.