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Shad Roe Sauce

A sauce made from shad roe, butter, flour, and salt, simmered and served.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Shad Roe Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the roe

  1. Wash the shad roes in cold water.

  2. Place them in a saucepan with salt and cover with boiling water.

  3. Cover and simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  4. Remove the outer skin and mash the roe finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Make a white sauce by melting butter and mixing in flour.

  2. Add the mashed roe to the white sauce, boil once, 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. 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).

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 roes
Provide the main flavour and body of the sauce once mashed into it.
Butter
Melts with the flour to form the base of the white sauce and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the butter and liquid into a white sauce that carries the roe.

The step that matters

Simmer the roe gently. Boiling roe rapidly can toughen its delicate protein and make it grainy, so keeping the water at a gentle simmer keeps it tender before mashing.

“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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