Tag: Linton Hopkins

In our age of industrial farming, chefs around the country have begun to look at foraging as a way to add piercing flavors and visual excitement to their dishes: While indigenous, these wild edibles can seem exotic in their unfamiliarity. It’s a natural extension of the locavore movement, but in Atlanta, it’s also a way for Southern chefs to reconnect to their culinary roots without falling back on regional cooking cliches. Plants gathered deep in the woods or on the margins of cultivated lands now routinely show up on some of the fanciest tables in town.

Among the forty-four dishes listed on an April menu at Restaurant Eugene, my eyes came to rest on a description that roused my curiosity: "Roasted shad roe, onion puree, lime pickle butter.” An uninitiated tablemate cocked his head quizzically when this plate arrived at the table. No way around it: Shad roe is one of nature’s uglier handiworks. A lobe of tiny eggs from the notoriously bony shad fish that runs briefly through the mid-Atlantic rivers in spring, the roe looks like a bloody horror-flick prop when raw and turns an unappealing gray when cooked. Yet this fleeting prize is sublime in flavor, offering a mild but hardscrabble pungency that suggests freezing water, upstream struggle, and the funkier nuances of caviar. Matching it with lime pickle butter tamed its feral qualities and evoked two distinct cuisines: Pickles are a staple in the South, but the triple hit of brine, heat, and citrus tasted undeniably of an Indian condiment. What an ingenious collaboration.