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Baked Shad Roe
(Northern France.) Skin two large roes and lay them on an earthen plate which has been sprinkled with bread-crumbs, chopped onion, and parsley, 3 mushrooms minced, and some butter. Cover with more of these, and pour over 1 cup of white stock mixed with a spoonful of sherry. Bake in the oven 1/2 an hour, drain off the sauce, strain it, and thicken it with flour and butter. Pour it over the fish once more, cover the top with bread-crumbs, and sprinkle lemon juice here and there. Brown it in the oven and serve hot.
MACKEREL (as cooked in the Tyrol.).
Wash and dry 2 fresh mackerel, put in a saucepan with salt, pepper, nutmeg, parsley, and chopped onion, and 2 tablespoonfuls of cider. Cover and cook 1/2 hour, add 1 cup of veal broth, thickened with flour and butter, the yolk of an egg, and a tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar. Strain this sauce, pour over the fish again, dot with bread-crumbs, and bake a light brown. Serve in the same dish in which it is baked. Earthen dishes are always used abroad, red, striped with yellow or black.
Two recipes share this page: baked shad roe in the French manner and a Tyrolean treatment of mackerel. Both follow the same shape — cook the fish in a little liquid, strain and thicken the cooking liquor, return it, crumb the top and brown — so the notes below apply to each in turn.
- Handle the roe gently"Skin" here means removing any loose outer membrane and gristle, not stripping the sacs bare; the enclosing membrane is what holds the eggs together. Prick each lobe two or three times with a needle so trapped steam does not burst it in the oven.
- Half an hour is too long for roeA pair of large shad roes is cooked through in 15 to 20 minutes in a 350F oven, and firm at about 145F at the thickest point. Held for the full half hour they turn chalky and grainy.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given because the book assumes a range oven judged by hand. Use 350F for the baking, then a hot broiler or 425F for the final browning of the crumbs, which takes only a few minutes.
- White stockAn unseasoned light stock of veal or chicken bones, cooked without browning. Low-sodium chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent; the "veal broth" in the mackerel is the same thing.
- Earthen plateA shallow glazed gratin or baking dish, wide enough to hold the roes in one layer. The point of the instruction is that the dish goes from oven to table, so choose something presentable and avoid thin metal, which scorches the crumb layer.
- Thickening with flour and butterBeurre mani — equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked into the simmering strained liquor a little at a time. For one cup of stock, about a tablespoon of each gives a sauce that coats.
- The egg yolk in the mackerel sauceAdd it off the heat, tempered with a spoonful of the hot broth first, and do not let the sauce boil afterwards or it will curdle. The tarragon vinegar goes in last for the same reason.
- Mackerel timing and liquidTwo tablespoons of cider in a covered pan is a steam-braise rather than a poach. Whole mackerel of a pound or so each need 15 to 20 minutes covered over low heat, not thirty; the flesh is oily and collapses when overdone. Cider in Europe at this date would usually have been fermented, which would add some acidity along with the moisture.
- YieldTwo large shad roes serve two generously or four as a first course. Two mackerel serve two.
Shad roe reads as a thoroughly American delicacy, but the shad (alose) has always run up the Loire, the Garonne and the Gironde in spring, and the treatment here is that given to any delicate offal — gently baked in a crumbed gratin with mushrooms, onion and parsley, close to a duxelles. That crumb-and-strained-sauce method is a workhorse of provincial French fish cookery, and it reappears here almost unchanged in the Tyrolean mackerel, which swaps sherry for cider and adds an egg yolk and tarragon vinegar. The book itself reads as travel cookery of the sort in which a writer collects dishes eaten abroad and reports them home along with observations on the tableware — hence the closing aside about red earthenware striped in yellow or black, offered as a piece of local colour as much as a cooking instruction. Worth noting that both wild Atlantic shad and Atlantic mackerel stocks have shifted considerably since the period; shad roe is now a short, tightly seasonal item in the United States and scarce in European markets.