Skip to main content
Baking

To Cook a Shad Roe

A dish of shad roe cooked in boiling water, seasoned, buttered, floured, and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Cook a Shad Roe

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Poach the roe

  1. Drop the shad roe into boiling water and cook gently for 20 minutes.

  2. Remove from heat and drain the roe.

Season and bake

  1. Butter a tin plate and place the drained roe on it.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper, then spread soft butter over it.

  3. Dredge thickly with flour.

  4. Cook in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 30 minutes, basting frequently with a mixture of salt, pepper, flour, butter, and water.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Roe + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Roe + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together177 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Shad roe
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming firm and tender when gently poached and then baked.
Soft butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the surface brown in the oven.
Flour
Dredged over the roe to form a coating that helps it brown and hold basting liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking the roe gently in boiling water. Shad roe is delicate, and a hard boil can toughen its membrane and break it apart. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer cooks the roe evenly and keeps it intact before baking.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More shad roe recipes

Croquettes 18Salad 11Sauce 7Omelet 3Omelette 3 See all 17 →

You might also like

Delicate CakeDelicate Cake246 recipesBoiled FrostingBoiled Frosting69 recipesCitron CakeCitron Cake68 recipesScotch CakeScotch Cake63 recipes