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Sauce

Shad Roe Sauce

A sauce made from mashed shad roe, butter, mace, Madeira, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Roe and butter work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 442 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Shad Roe Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the roe

  1. Mash the shad roes in cold water.

  2. Put them in a saucepan, add salt, and cover with boiling water; simmer without boiling.

  3. Drain, remove the outer skin, and mash finely.

Make the sauce

  1. In another saucepan, melt the butter, add mace and Madeira.

  2. Gradually add the mashed roe, let it boil briefly, and serve.

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

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

  2. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Roe + macetop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together33 recipes

Butter and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 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 roes
Provide the main body and rich flavour of the sauce once mashed.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Madeira
Adds sweetness and a fortified wine aroma that balances the rich roe.

The step that matters

Simmer the roe without boiling. Boiling toughens and dries the delicate roe proteins, making them grainy. Keeping the water just below a boil cooks them gently and keeps them tender and smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (roe, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against roe, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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