Home › Salads › Shad Roe Salad
Shad Roe Salad
Three shad roe, boiled in salted water twenty minutes. When cold, cut in thin slices. Season and set away. Serve with lettuce, a little lemon juice, a little salt, one-third of a teaspoonful of white pepper, one cupful of mayonnaise dressing, or the French dressing. Some think a little chopped pickled beet an improvement.
A cold composed salad of poached shad roe, which depends almost entirely on how the roe is cooked. Everything else is dressing.
- Keep the water below a boilThe hinge of the dish. Shad roe is a membrane packed with eggs; at a rolling boil the eggs expand, the sac splits and the roe crumbles into gravel. Bring salted water to a bare shiver, slide the roe in, and hold it there.
- Twenty minutes is for large pairsA large pair of shad roe is substantial and does need the time, but small or single lobes are firm through in 10 to 12 minutes. The roe is done when it is opaque and springs back; overcooked, it turns chalky and slices badly.
- Chill before slicingThe instruction to slice "when cold" is not casual. Warm roe falls apart under a knife; a few hours in the refrigerator sets the mass so it cuts into clean coins. Peel away any loose outer membrane first.
- "Season and set away"Salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon on the sliced roe, then refrigerate. The acid does real work here, cutting the strong oily quality that shad roe develops as it cools.
- Sourcing shad roeShad runs are a spring event and many Atlantic fisheries are now closed or tightly restricted, so the roe appears for a short season and often frozen. Buy pairs that are plump and bright, not slack or grey.
- The mayonnaiseA cupful of mayonnaise for three roe is generous by modern taste. Period mayonnaise was made with raw yolk and oil; commercial jarred mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and works the same way here.
- French dressing, 1900 senseOil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked to order; some period recipes add a little mustard or paprika, but not the sweetened tomato dressing that later attached to the name in America.
- YieldThree roe, sliced and arranged on lettuce, serve six as a first course or four as a lunch dish.
Shad was once among the most abundant food fishes on the Atlantic seaboard, and its spring run up the Hudson, Delaware and Susquehanna was a fixed point in the American calendar; the roe was prized well above the bony flesh and commanded its own price at market. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s are thick with shad roe — broiled on toast, sautéed, in salad.