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Shad Roe Creamed and Curried

A creamy sauce with shad roe, seasoned with lemon, onion, salt, pepper, and curry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Shad Roe Creamed and Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Cook and marinate

  1. Cook the roe in salted, acidulated water, simmering gently to avoid breaking the skin.

  2. Cut the roe into scallops or cubes, marinate with lemon juice, onion juice, salt, and pepper, then cover and let stand for several hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Prepare a white sauce in a double boiler using butter and flour, then gradually add milk.

  2. Add the marinated roe to the white sauce and let it stand over hot water to reheat.

  3. For a variation, add 1 tablespoon of curry powder with the flour.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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, giving it a tender, delicate texture once cooked.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, and combines with flour to form the base of the white sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk and butter into a smooth white sauce as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the white sauce, adding moisture and creaminess.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that firms the roe's surface and brightens the flavor during marinating.
Curry powder
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor to the sauce in the variation.

The step that matters

Cooking the roe gently. Simmering gently keeps the roe's delicate membrane from splitting. Vigorous boiling can break the skin and let the roe's contents escape, leaving the roe dry and ragged.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against roe, lemon, pepper, butter, flour, milk. 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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