Fish Roe Supreme will grace any plate. Served with rice and veggies.

While my hushpuppies still seem to draw a flattering number of compliments, they are seldom quite as good as they could be. That’s because an ingredient I once considered standard has long since become unavailable—canned fish roe. Little tins labeled “mixed roe” used to inhabit grocery shelves with the sardines and minced clams, but I haven’t seen them for years.

Of course, I could instead stir some leftover or fresh-cooked roe into my hushpuppy batter and I sometimes do, but it’s far from a routine practice. Whenever I am blessed with fresh roe—either by surprise as a byproduct of my fishing or by design at the fish market—I immediately start planning more elaborate uses for it, because I consider fresh roe a delicacy matched only by the catch-of-the-day itself.

But when is roe not roe? The answer, of course—speaking commercially rather than biologically—is when it’s caviar. Even though both roe and caviar come our way by courtesy of pregnant fishes, there is a distinct, if slight, difference between them.

Caviar derives from particular species—most notably sturgeons—that produce large individual eggs. Before marketing, the eggs are stripped from the ovarian membrane, then processed and salted. The resulting caviar, depending on one’s personal point of view, makes either a scrumptious hors d’oeurve suitable for the most refined and prosperous (some would say pompous) tastes, or else a smelly candidate for the chum pot. If you haven’t developed an addiction to caviar yourself, be grateful. The “real stuff”—beluga caviar from the Caspian Sea—already sells for several thousand dollars per pound and the price is pretty sure to soar even higher, because sturgeon stocks are dangerously depleted over there, the fishery is closed and the black marketeers are rubbing their hands in anticipation of great rewards.

You even have to pay hundreds per pound for the most common black caviar produced in America, which is derived from the ungainly looking paddlefish of Midwestern rivers. All the fish that produce caviar-size eggs appear to be freshwater spawners. Among many, they include several other species of sturgeon, plus carp, whitefish, trout and salmon. Of course, gourmets quibble about the inclusion of the lovely pink eggs of salmon, insisting that “pink caviar” is a contradiction in terms. Caviar, they insist, must be black, or at least gray.

Shad roe is both huge and delicious, and perhaps the best-known and best-liked roe in all the land. But while I would never turn down a chance to partake of shad roe, it doesn’t top my list. That honor goes to the golden roe of the lowly mullet, but by only a small margin over the roe of speckled trout, dolphin and a few other varieties of fish that my personal angling sometimes turns up.

Mullet roe is “in season” in the fall, roughly from October through December, and since mullet themselves are at their fattest and most delicious at the same time, the purchase of roe mullet from a Florida fish market delivers double value at not quite double the price. You will, however, pay a premium. Or you could buy the roe only. It comes in two colors, white as well as gold. The white variety comes from male fish and is, technically, not roe, although it wears that name. It’s good, too, but not so richly flavored as the eggs it was meant to fertilize.

Many lovers of mullet roe—those who are competent hurlers of big cast nets—pay for it only in time and effort. Legally speaking, even the markets now depend on cast-netting to supply them with mullet, inasmuch as Floridians voted overwhelmingly to ban gillnets in state waters about a dozen years ago. The ban took effect just in time, for mullet stocks were being dangerously overfished—mostly in order to supply a huge international demand for their roe. That fact provides a hint as to the high esteem in which mullet roe is held.

My roots are in North Florida. That part of the state is located in the Deep South, where the generations-long culinary tradition is to toss just about everything from steak to okra into a frying pan. No surprise, then, that my earliest introductions to the delights of roe—mullet roe in the fall and trout roe in the spring—was to fried roe, which sat on my plate flanked by a crunchily browned mullet fillet on one side and a hushpuppy or two on the other.

Old tastes die hard and so the first presentation below remains my top choice. The procedure is easy, but you must be aware that roe is given to “popping” dangerously when cooked at deep-frying temperatures. Be sure to pierce the membrane with a fork in a couple of places before starting, and to keep the pan covered while roe is cooking; otherwise you could easily be splattered by hot, flying grease.

Frying fish chunks and fish roe together.

DEEP FRIED FISH AND ROE

Fillets of mullet or other fish,

one per person

Roe, one large or one pair per person

Buttermilk, for soaking

Self-rising cornmeal

Salt and pepper