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Shad-roe Sauce

A sauce made from shad roe, salt, water, and butter, simmered and served with snails.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the roe

  1. Place the shad roes in a saucepan.

  2. Add the coarse sea salt.

  3. Cover with boiling water.

  4. Simmer for 20 minutes.

  5. Remove the roes.

Make the sauce

  1. Slice the roes.

  2. Mash the sliced roes.

  3. Make a rich drawn butter.

  4. Add the mashed roe to the butter.

  5. Stir the mixture.

  6. Let it boil.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled or baked snails.

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).

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 a soft, creamy body once mashed into the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the roe a smooth, flowing sauce texture.

The step that matters

Let it boil. Roe is delicate protein. Once it is mashed into hot butter, prolonged boiling can toughen it and make the sauce grainy or split the butter. Keep heat gentle and watch closely.

“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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