Name: Broiled Shad Roes
Ingredients: roes from 2 shad; ½ cup drawn butter; 3 hard-boiled egg yolks; 1 teaspoon anchovy paste or essence; 1 teaspoon minced parsley; juice of ½ lemon; 1 cup bread crumbs; salt to taste; cayenne pepper to taste

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Broiled Shad Roes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the roe

Drop the roes into boiling salted water and cook gently for 10 minutes.
Transfer them to ice water for 10 minutes to blanch and firm them up.
Wipe the roes and set them on ice until cold and stiff.
Rub the roes all over with oil and lemon juice or vinegar.

Broil and serve

Broil the roes over clear coals until cooked.
For the sauce, whip the drawn butter with lemon juice and minced parsley.
Serve the broiled roes covered with the sauce.

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.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Roe + anchovytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together65 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Shad roe: Provides the rich, delicate body that the firming and broiling set into a sliceable texture.
Drawn butter: Adds fat and richness to the sauce, carrying the flavor over the broiled roe.
Egg yolks: Emulsify with the butter to give the sauce a smooth, thickened body.
Bread crumbs: Add body and a light texture to the dish.

The step that matters

Blanching and chilling the roe before broiling. Gentle poaching followed by cold water and chilling firms the delicate membranes so the roe holds together on the coals instead of breaking apart or drying out. Skipping the chill leaves it fragile.

“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.

Brown Bread461 recipes

Lemon Sauce236 recipes

White Bread80 recipes

Bread Omelette60 recipes

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Broiled Shad Roes