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Baked Shad Stuffed with Oysters
Select a large shad. Clean, dry, and rub thoroughly with salt, inside and out. Make a dressing of grated bread crumbs and oysters, season it well with pepper and salt and plenty of butter. Put the fish in a baking pan with enough water to keep it from burning; bake about one hour basting often with butter and the essence from the fish. When brown place the fish on a platter where it will keep hot; cover the fish over while you prepare the gravy. Add a spoonful of catsup and the juice of half a lemon to the gravy. Garnish the fish with water cresses or curled parsley. The sauce should be served in a sauce boat.
The recipe assumes you know what a baked whole fish looks like when it is done, and it never names an oven temperature. Two things need decisions: the heat, and how you handle the oysters.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book assumes a coal range. Bake at 375-400F, and judge doneness by the flesh at the thickest part of the back pulling away from the bone, or 145F on an instant-read thermometer.
- Sourcing shadAmerican shad is no longer a routine market fish; commercial harvest is closed or tightly restricted in many Atlantic states, and it appears mainly in spring, sometimes sold pre-boned. A large bluefish, striped bass or whole trout of 3-5 lb takes the same treatment.
- The bonesShad has a notoriously complex set of floating intramuscular bones that no amount of baking dissolves. Buy it boned if you can, or serve it as the period did and let diners work around them.
- The oystersFold shucked oysters into the crumbs whole and raw, with a little of their liquor to moisten. They will finish inside the fish in far less than the hour, so drain them well and do not pre-cook or they turn to rubber.
- Stuffing quantityFor a 4 lb fish, figure about 3 cups of dry breadcrumbs, a pint of oysters, and 4 oz of butter. "Plenty of butter" is not hyperbole; the crumbs need to be visibly rich or the dressing bakes dry. Skewer or tie the cavity closed.
- Basting liquid"The essence from the fish" means the pan juices, which the small amount of water is there to protect from scorching. Add water a spoonful at a time if the pan runs dry; too much and the fish poaches instead of browning.
- The gravyWhat is left in the pan is thin and needs reducing on the stovetop before the catsup and lemon go in. 'Catsup' at this date could mean a mushroom or walnut catsup as readily as a tomato one, and tomato catsups were generally thinner and sharper than modern bottled ketchup; a mushroom ketchup, or a spoonful of tomato paste with a splash of vinegar, is likely closer to the intent.
- YieldA 4-5 lb stuffed shad serves six as a main course. Serve it whole on a hot platter, as directed, with the sauce separate.
Shad was one of the great seasonal events of the eastern American table. The fish runs up the Delaware, Hudson, Susquehanna and Potomac in spring to spawn, and for two centuries its arrival meant cheap, abundant, fatty fish in the cities along those rivers, with planked shad and shad roe as spring fixtures on Philadelphia and Baltimore menus. Pairing it with an oyster dressing reflects a period when oysters were a bulk ingredient rather than a luxury, sold by the barrel and used as freely in stuffings and sauces as mushrooms are now. Both halves of the dish tell the same story about American cooking of that era: overwhelming local abundance from bay and river, and a habit of dressing plain fish in butter and a sauce boat to make it fit for company. The abundance is what changed. Overfishing, dams blocking the spawning runs and river pollution reduced shad catches sharply he mid-1890s, and the fishery never recovered.