Baked Shad
1 shad weighing 4 lbs. 1/4 lb. mushrooms 1/2 cupful Crisco 2 tablespoonfuls chopped parsley 2 tablespoonfuls chopped chives 1 cupful breadcrumbs 1 egg Salt and white pepper Salt pork 1 cupful cream 1 teaspoonful cornstarch Clean, wipe and dry the shad. Melt Crisco, add breadcrumbs, chopped mushrooms, parsley, chives, egg well beaten, salt and pepper. Stuff fish with this forcemeat, then lay it in a greased pan, put thin strips of salt pork over it and bake in hot oven for forty minutes. Lay the fish on a hot platter. Pour cream into baking pan, add cornstarch and stir till boiling. Serve with the fish.
A plain baked stuffed fish from a Crisco-sponsored menu book, and it works as written provided you watch the timing rather than the clock. Shad is rich and thin-fleshed, and forty minutes in a hot oven is the outer limit.
- The hinge: cook to temperatureA stuffed 4 lb shad in a hot oven will be done at roughly 30-40 minutes, but the fish is finished when the thickest flesh reaches about 135-140F and separates from the bone. Shad is oily but delicate, and past that point it goes dry and cottony.
- "Hot oven"Period cookbooks give no fixed scale, but a hot oven is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. Use 425F; the salt pork bastes the fish as it renders and will scorch above that.
- CriscoThis book was written to promote Crisco, then a new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening. Half a cupful of melted butter gives a better forcemeat and substitutes directly.
- Shad bonesShad has notorious fine intramuscular bones, set in several rows, that no amount of baking dissolves. Buy it boned by the fishmonger if you can; otherwise plan to eat it carefully off the bone rather than filleting at table.
- Sourcing shadAmerican shad is a spring river fish and runs are much reduced from 1915 levels; some fisheries are closed. Check what is landed locally. Bluefish or a whole mackerel of similar weight takes the same treatment.
- Salt porkThin strips of salt pork laid over the fish are barding, not seasoning — they keep the surface from drying. Blanch very salty pork for a minute first, or use thin-cut unsmoked bacon.
- The sauceOne teaspoonful of cornstarch to a cupful of cream gives a barely thickened pan sauce, not a gravy. Slurry the cornstarch in a little cold cream before it goes into the hot pan, and scrape up the pork fond as it comes to a boil.
- YieldA 4 lb whole shad with stuffing serves four to five, allowing for the head, frame and heavy bone loss.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe books Procter & Gamble commissioned to introduce Crisco to American cooks after 1911, which is why a shortening appears where an earlier book would simply have said butter. The fish itself was a spring institution on the Atlantic seaboard: shad ran up the Hudson, Delaware and Connecticut rivers in enormous numbers, cheap enough to be a working household's dinner, and the roe was prized above the flesh. Baking a whole stuffed shad barded with salt pork is the standard nineteenth-century American treatment, and both Mrs. Rorer and Fannie Farmer wrote on shad, though how closely their versions correspond to this one is not clear; the mushroom-and-chive forcemeat and the cream pan sauce here are the genteel touches of a 1910s menu book aiming at a dinner-party table.