ISSUE 26, BREAKFAST, Part 3: Herring Roe, an old Virginia Breakfast Tradition

With a recipe or two

Herring Roes—Gone Missing from the Traditional Tidewater Breakfast

Many of us have savored shad roe broiled in bacon, an ideal Sunday Brunch dish of March and April. But how many have tasted that other southern roe—once cheap, omnipresent, and a favorite item on the traditional Tidewater table—herring roe.  Sold in flat one and two lb cans “Old Virginia Breakfast Roe” made the milt of the Atlantic Herring and other herring species were a popular presence on grocery shelves, at the breakfast tables of resort hotels on the Shore and at the Springs, and on boarding house sidetables each morning in tidewater towns.  Canned, it was a year round resource. 

Fresh roes taken as a pair from a split Atlantic Herring require some attention, for parasitic worms are often found nesting between the two lobes. For this reason the roes were never baked in the fish. They were always extracted, cleaned, and usually canned. The worms never invaded the egg sacs themselves.

There were multitudes of recipes—fried with bacon on toast, formed into balls, deviled, and sautéed in butter with lemon. 

As with many marine resources that were not well enough regulated, the fishery became exhausted, and in the mid-20th century, canned herring roe vanished.  People still ate shad roe in season of course.  But now if you want herring roes in a can as a pantry staple you will have to buy on Allibaba or eBay, securing Asian or eastern European product.  Is this a resource that can come back?  Will Virginians ever experience again herring roe from their own waters?  Marine scientists give mixed messages about farming these fish.  A VIMS scientist said to me candidly, if enough demand existed and enough money devoted to the matter, “anything could happen.” Well provoking demand has got to start somewhere. 

If you’re catching the herring and prepping it yourself, remember to clean it thoroughly.