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Shad Roe (Wipe the roe with a bit of wet)
Wipe the roe with a bit of wet cloth and dry it well. Brush over with olive oil or with melted butter and broil about five minutes or until brown on each side. It should be well cooked and when done the little grain-like eggs will be a light brown color. If pink, it should be cooked longer. For a small family it is better to cook the roe in salted water, and the next day broil it as above, or split it and dip in flour and brown it in hot pork fat.
A spring set-piece from the days when shad ran thick in every Atlantic river. The technique is sound; only the timing and the handling of the membrane need comment.
- The hinge: prick the membraneA roe sac is a sealed bag of eggs and steam, and under a broiler it will burst and spatter. Pierce it in several places with a needle or the point of a knife before it goes near the heat. The book assumes the cook already knows this.
- Broil, meaning grill from aboveIn the period this book comes from, "broil" meant cooking over or before live coals. In a modern oven use the broiler element with the rack about 4 inches below it, or a heavy pan over medium heat. The recipe's five minutes is a guide only; it tells you to go by colour on each side, and a large set will want longer.
- DonenessThe instruction to cook until the eggs are light brown and no longer pink is period practice and gives a firm, faintly chalky roe. Many cooks now stop at just-set with a rosy centre, which is creamier. Both are defensible; the original is telling you what a 1900 table expected.
- The parboil is the useful partPoaching the roe first in gently salted water firms the sac so it holds together and lets you finish it fast the next day; the recipe wants it cooked through at this stage, not merely blanched. Keep the water at a bare shiver; a hard boil splits the membrane.
- Pork fatRendered salt pork or bacon fat, both common in kitchens of the period. Bacon fat is the closest modern equivalent, and bacon alongside the roe is a traditional American pairing.
- YieldOne roe pair serves one generous portion or two modest ones. Roe are sold as pairs still joined by a membrane; leave them joined for poaching and separate afterwards if you like.
- Sourcing and seasonShad roe appears for a few weeks in spring and comes from a fish whose stocks are managed differently state by state. Buy from a fishmonger who can say where it came from, and use it the day you get it.
Shad is the great spring fish of the American Atlantic coast, running up the Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna and Connecticut rivers in such numbers through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it fed both fine restaurants and the poorest riverside households; the roe, taken from the females on their spawning run, was the prized part and marked the arrival of the season. A cookbook of this period could assume its readers bought roe by the pair in season without explanation, which is why this entry spends its words on doneness rather than on what a shad is. The suggestion to poach the roe one day and brown it the next is a thrift note: it keeps a large set from being wasted by a small household, and it reflects a kitchen where cold cooked food was routinely revived in a hot pan. Overfishing, dams and pollution thinned the runs badly over the twentieth century, and shad roe has gone from a commonplace of spring to a brief specialty item.