Season and stuff the shad with chopped oysters and mushrooms well seasoned. Place in a well-buttered baking-dish; sprinkle with fine bread-crumbs, chopped onion and parsley. Put flakes of butter on top and pour in 1 cup of tomato-sauce. Let bake until done. Baste often with the sauce. Serve with celery salad with French dressing.
A terse turn-of-the-century entry that assumes you know how to bone a shad and judge a fish oven by eye. The gaps are all in temperature, timing and the stuffing.
- Oven and timingThe recipe gives no heat at all. A moderate oven, around 375F, suits it; a stuffed 3-4 lb shad takes roughly 40-50 minutes. Take the flesh to 145F at the thickest point, and check the stuffing separately -- because it contains raw oysters it should reach 165F.
- Do not overcook the oystersChop them and mix them raw into the crumb stuffing. Pre-cooking them, or a long extra bake to "be sure," turns them to erasers; check the stuffing with a thermometer instead of guessing.
- Sourcing shadAmerican shad runs are much reduced and many East Coast fisheries are closed or tightly limited, so shad is seasonal and regional at best. Bluefish, mackerel or a whole trout takes the same treatment; shad's own selling point was its fat, oily flesh and its roe.
- The bonesShad has a notoriously intricate lateral bone structure that ordinary filleting does not remove. Buy it boned by the fishmonger, or plan to serve it on the bone and warn the table.
- Stuffing quantityThe recipe gives none. For a 3-4 lb fish, figure about a cup of chopped oysters (roughly 12 shucked), a cup of chopped mushrooms sweated dry first so the cavity does not flood, and enough fresh crumbs to bind. Skewer or tie the belly closed.
- Tomato-sauceIn cookery of this period this meant a cooked, sieved, seasoned sauce rather than plain canned tomato. A cup of thin, well-seasoned passata or a light marinara works; if it is too thick it will scorch instead of basting.
- BastingThe sauce in the dish is the basting liquid, and it is the only thing keeping the crumb topping from drying out. Spoon it over every ten minutes or so, and add a splash of water or stock if it reduces to paste.
- YieldA 3-4 lb stuffed shad serves four. The celery salad with French dressing is not decoration -- an acidic, crunchy side is the intended counterweight to an oily fish under a buttered crumb crust.
March 16 falls within the spring shad run, which may be why the fish appears where it does in a book organised as a dish a day: shad was a spring event on both sides of the Atlantic, abundant for a few weeks and then gone. The "Belgian" label in these nations-of-the-world dish calendars is loose branding rather than provenance. Oysters used as a stuffing for a whole baked fish was thoroughly ordinary in both Northern Europe and the United States before oyster beds were fished out and prices rose. The fish itself, Alosa sapidissima on the American side and the closely related allis shad in Europe, was once so plentiful that shad planking and shad bakes were community occasions; both have since declined sharply from damming and overfishing.