Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Herring roe mystery solved!

When I was growing up in Maryland, one of our favorite treats was eggs scrambled with canned herring roe, Tidewater brand to be specific. Cheap as dirt back then. At some point they disappeared from stores altogether, not sure exactly when, but about 20 years ago I found some up here at a Food Lion on clearance for a buck a can and bought the few they had. After that, nada.
Once in a while I’d pick up some sets of shad roe when I went to the Eastern Shore to visit my father or he’d bring some to me, but they’re pretty spendy and a pain to prepare for mixing in eggs, and really better enjoyed cooked whole in butter. Plus, I’ve never seen them locally, and grocery store “fresh” seafood is a crapshoot anyway.

For some reason I recalled the herring roe last night and started looking on duckduckgo. It seems that river herring have declined sharply and VA no longer allows them to be taken. Apparently the decline began about the time they introduced the monster blue catfish into the VA tidal rivers, but from what I read the connection isn’t solid. NC, on the other hand, still has a fishery for them, and the Tidewater brand was purchased, along with an old NC brand, and the new owner is selling under both names. The price has skyrocketed, and they ain’t poor-folks food any more, not even close. They’re sold online, and in some of those trendy “country stores” that are really down-home gourmet shops. Seems the annual output gets sold out pretty quickly now to folks who grew up on such stuff. Anyway, I bit the bullet and ordered a case at a price I don't care to discuss. WTF, my birthday is coming up.

While looking I also discovered that salted, dried fish roe is popular not only in Asia, but Yurrup as well. Generally it’s grated onto eggs and pasta, and also sliced thin as a snack like cheese. Amazon has that, so I might have to give it a try as well.

Pappy, life is to short to worry about, what something you like costs.

We order a carton of cans of Alaskan smoked salmon, about every 2nd year.

Currency exchange & freight costs now prohibitive, but .................. we still do it.

Been spending money hand-over-fist lately, for exactly that reason. Gonna be 69; if not now, when?

Now you need to look into getting herring roe on kelp...

He's going to have to outbid the Asians for that I think, no?

Pappy, somewhere around here we had a thread about tongue and some other cuts of meat that used to be "po' folks" food, Not any longer. Seems the foodies have found out how good some of that stuff tastes and now it's in short supply.

Bone broth recipes makes it so the butcher counters no longer have bones for free if you ask, "oxtail" no longer in the discount meat section.

Good thing for me, whole chickens and turkeys usually come with the backs and necks.

We used to buy the dried seaweed sheets regularly at Costco and the Asian stores, but even the China Doll tired of it. It’s kinda tasty with rice and whatnot. Has a nutty taste to me. Don’t know if fresh kelp is available anywhere around here. The plague has us restricted from making the journey to the big Korean supermarket we used to hit every few months, so our diet is taking a Western turn other than the homemade dumplings, eggrolls, steamed buns, and mooncakes she cranks out. We grow some Asian veggies like daikons and a few others, when we can find the seeds.

Now that my herring roe is on its way, I’m itching to try the dried and salted Italian mullet roe too. The wife is from the North end of China and never ate anything like that, so I expect it’s a Southern thing.

When I was a kid in MD, fish in general was cheap, rockfish (stripers), bluefish, shad, hardheads, spot, even crabs.

As for the herring, I remember my uncle taking me and my brother shad fishing. No shad were harmed, but you coulda almost walked across the herring in the creek we fished. We didn’t have a dip net, just fishing rods with shad darts.

No herring fishery in NC any more. Just about all of them come from SC. When I was a kid my mom's side of the family would get together at Pitch Kettle close to New Bern, NC. We would have NC fish stew made from what they called rockfish but were striped bass. We fried herring and ate them with white bread. At the end of the day my uncles Chevy truck was still full of herring and we would take them to all of the farm workers houses. They would come out with wheel barrows and we would scoop them out of the truck bed and into the wheel barrows with a grain shovel. There were a bunch of canneries on the rivers and creeks back then. Folks also did salt herring and the local stores had those for sale in five gallon buckets. They were over fished in their spawning grounds as were the striped bass. Add in the ocean fishing and you not only have a death of an industry but an almost demise of two species.

So, it wasn't the blue cats then. Not surprised. That part of the story I read was probably a, wait for it.......

red herring, to take the heat off of the commercial fishing folks.

I don't eat fish guts.

So, not prohibitive?

Not guts, more like very young fish veal. Eggs with eggs.

If you think about it, it’s no worse than eating the ones that fall out of a chicken’s azz.

As I always say, anyone that’ll eat an oyster will eat anything (in the case of the oyster, everything).