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To Bake Shad
-H. M. Kinsley, Chicago.
Split the shad down the back, wash, and salt well, wipe well with a cloth, rub inside and out with a small quantity of cayenne pepper. Prepare a dressing of bread crumbs, seasoned with pepper, salt, thyme, celery seed, some chopped onions, and a spoonful of butter. Tie the fish well in order to keep in the stuffing, place in a baking pan with water enough to bake it, and a large spoonful of butter. Dust a little flour over the fish. Baste well while cooking Cook slowly until well done.
A restaurant chef's method set down in shorthand: no quantities, no temperature, no time. The bones are the reason it is baked slowly, and that is the point to hold onto.
- Why "slowly until well done"Shad is among the boniest fish sold, with rows of fine intramuscular bones that a filleting knife does not reach. Long, moist baking is the traditional answer, and several hours in a low oven is reported to soften them; 45 minutes at 350F will cook the flesh and leave every bone intact. Decide which you are after before you start.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only "cook slowly" and names no oven; a low oven, somewhere around 300F, is the usual modern reading of that. If you are baking only to cook the fish rather than to dissolve bones, 350F for 10-12 minutes per inch of thickness at the shoulder is more reliable; the recommended reading for cooked fish is about 145F.
- Split down the backThis is a butterfly, not a fillet — cut along either side of the backbone from the back rather than the belly, leaving the fish joined at the belly skin so it opens flat and holds stuffing. Ask the fishmonger to do it and to leave the head off.
- Sourcing shadAmerican shad runs are much reduced and several states have closed their fisheries, so it is seasonal and regional at best, appearing in spring. Bluefish, mackerel or a large trout take the same treatment; none of them need the long bone-softening bake.
- The dressing, quantifiedNo amounts are given. For a 3-4 lb butterflied shad, about 3 cups of dry breadcrumbs, one medium onion chopped and softened in the butter, a teaspoon of thyme, a half teaspoon of celery seed, salt and pepper, moistened with a little stock or water until it just holds together. The recipe distinguishes "a spoonful" of butter in the dressing from "a large spoonful" in the pan, so make the pan butter the more generous of the two; neither is defined.
- Salting and wipingThe recipe salts well and then wipes the fish dry, with no time given; the effect is to season and to draw off surface moisture. Twenty to thirty minutes is ample; much longer and the fish may end up over-salted.
- Tying and bastingButcher's twine at three or four points, or trussing skewers laced with twine. Keep the water in the pan shallow — a quarter inch, topped up as it goes — so the fish bakes rather than poaches, and baste as the recipe directs to keep the dusted flour browning.
- Yield and the roeA stuffed 3-4 lb shad serves four to six. If the fish comes with its roe, do not bake it alongside; the sacs need separate, gentle cooking in butter and are the more prized half of the fish.
H. M. Kinsley ran one of Chicago's grandest catering and restaurant operations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and turn-of-the-century compilations like this one traded heavily on such names — a recipe credited to a famous hotel or caterer sold the book. The dish itself is older than the credit: baked stuffed shad was a fixture of the Atlantic spring, when the fish ran up the Hudson and Delaware rivers and into the Chesapeake to spawn in such numbers that shad was cheap food, planked over fires at shore parties and baked whole at home. Shad is generally described in early American cookery as the harbinger of spring, and the slow cooking called for here — the recipe says only "cook slowly" — is often said to be a household answer to its notorious bones. That a Chicago chef was cooking it at all is a note on the period's railroads and ice cars, which put an Eastern river fish on inland tables.