Another harbinger
Yes, I’m still thinking on signs of spring. Last week, I hijacked the family as we made our way back home from a very loooong History Day competition and had Dennis make a forced landing at Westside Market. I wanted fish from Kate’s Fish for dinner (my favorite Cleveland fishmonger, she usually has the freshest and most varied selection). As soon as I approached the counter, I saw them. Neat pairs of shad roe. A perennial sign of spring if ever there was one. You can read history and habits in a nice piece here. But basically, the shad is a very large herring that swims it’s bony self from ocean to rivers to spawn. The guy who helped me out was very curious about how I planned to cook my shad roe. Now, since I hadn’t made any since I lived near the Hudson (14 years ago) in New York, I wasn’t too exactly sure. I seem to remember mom sauteeing them in butter, finishing with salt and pepper and squirting lemon. Nothing fancy at all. So I said that. He said everyone else was adding bacon — in fact, he felt that bacon was an absolute necessity. I told him I didn’t eat no stinking bacon. Actually, I said I didn’t eat meat. Yes, there are those of you who are at this moment remembering my early non-meat eating years where I declared that bacon wasn’t actually meat and made sure that I had some weekly. Well, I got more refined. I am off bacon. He wrapped up my shad roe. And then said that he once met a fellow who gave him an excellent recipe for shad.
Now, I love these moments and I become very aware. Here I am, patient husband at my side, our heads inclined forward to catch his special food wisdom through the din of the market. The wise fishmonger (maybe he will give me a recipe as fine as Patricia Well’s Tuna Daube, which came from her Provencal fishmonger and which I am making tonight).
The recipe follows:
Heat up your oven, very hot.
Put a brick in it.
Put a shad in a pan with some seasonings and butter and put it in the oven.
When it’s done. Take out the brick. Take out the fish. Keep the brick and throw out the fish because shad tastes worse than a brick any day.
sigh.
There you have it. Of course I knew already that I would have had a hell of a time getting anyone in the family to eat large fried fish egg sacs so I got some Arctic Char.
And we headed home.
I ended up sauteeing the roe as I mentioned above and it was good. You have to like the strong taste though, which may be where bacon comes in. I found a non-bacon recipe which I haven’t tried but which is close to what I did. And then another more complex one with bacon or pancetta (fancy pants shad roe).
As for the tuna daube tonight? I am here without the cook book and can’t find it anywhere on the internet so I am going to wing it, so to speak.