Anchovies
One reason that cooking is fun is that you can do anything you want. To really have fun be bold and don’t overlook cookbooks. You can learn a lot more from a cookbook than a recipe posted on an internet cooking site. When I say be bold it will help you to do that the more you know. You just might not know the secrets that lie within that allow a dish to be spectacular. For instance roe, that is, fish eggs residing in the fishes ovarian sack. If you Google it you’ll get a lot of shad roe recipes, which is fine of course, as shad roe with bacon and toast points is a well-known American dish. But all fish have roe if they’re female and there’s a lot of roe…okay, let’s call it caviar…being tossed away for garbage.
The other day I bought some fresh anchovies that were caught off San Pedro, California, but I had to buy them in an Italian market because Californians don’t eat anchovies as they use them for bait. I was preparing a recipe test (acciughe a la spezzina) of baked anchovies with thinly sliced potatoes and as I was gutting the tiny anchovies I realized they were all female and all had teeny roe sacks. I set them side.
Anchovy roe with scrambled egg
The roe from a pound of anchovies amounts to about an ounce or less so I realized that this was an appetizer I was about to make. In a small nonstick saute pan I heated about a teaspoon of olive oil and sauteed a pinch of fresh garlic and parsley, a teaspoon of onion, the roe, and 1 large egg for about a minute and that was that. It was just as perfect as could be.
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