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To Broil Shad
Split and wash the shad, then dry it on a cloth. Season with salt and pepper. Grease your gridiron well; when hot, lay the shad upon it, the skin side down, in order that it may retain the juice; when done, butter it and send to the table.
A three-line recipe that assumes a coal or wood fire and a hinged gridiron; the technique translates directly to a grill or broiler, provided you respect the fish's fragility.
- The gridironA gridiron is a flat rack of iron bars set over live coals — closer to a modern grill grate than to an oven broiler. If you use an oven broiler instead, put the fish on an oiled rack about 4 inches from the element and do not turn it.
- "Split" the shadThis means butterflied: the fish opened flat along the backbone, head and guts removed, so it cooks in one thin layer. Any fishmonger will do it; a whole shad runs 3 to 5 lb and splits into a piece roughly an inch thick at the shoulder.
- Heat matters more than timeThe grate must be hot and well greased before the fish touches it, or the skin welds to the bars and the flesh tears when you lift it. Shad is oily and will flare — keep a cooler corner of the grill free.
- When is it doneA split shad of this size needs roughly 8 to 12 minutes, skin side down the entire time, until the flesh turns opaque and pulls away from the bones at the thickest point. Many cooks pull it at around 130-135F internal because it dries out quickly past that; standard food-safety guidance for fish is 145F.
- BonesShad is notoriously bone-ridden — a lattice of fine floating bones running through the flesh, quite apart from the ribs. Buy it boned if you can, and warn anyone at the table who has not eaten it before.
- The butter"Butter it and send to the table" means a knob of plain butter melting over the hot fish, nothing more. A squeeze of lemon and coarse salt is in keeping; shad roe, when the fish carried it, was commonly cooked separately, often floured and fried.
- YieldOne split shad of 3 to 4 lb serves three or four as a main course.
American shad (Alosa sapidissima — the species name means "most delicious") ran up the Atlantic rivers every spring in enormous numbers, and its arrival was a fixed seasonal event along the Delaware, Hudson and Susquehanna through the nineteenth century. Shad was cheap, abundant and unavoidable in season. Planked shad — nailed to a board and set upright before an open fire — was the ceremonial version at riverside shad bakes; broiling on a gridiron was the same idea in a domestic kitchen, and the instruction to keep the skin down so the fish "may retain the juice" reflects a practical truth about a fatty fish that will render itself dry if flipped about. The runs collapsed in the twentieth century under damming and pollution, and shad is now a regional specialty rather than a spring staple.