Baked Shad
Open and clean the fish, cut off head (or not as preferred) cut out the backbone from the head to within two inches of the tail, and fill with the following mixture: Soak stale bread in water, squeeze dry; cut a large onion in pieces, fry in butter, chop fine, add the bread, two ounces of butter, salt, pepper, and a little parsley or sage; heat thoroughly, and when taken from the fire, add two yolks of well-beaten eggs; stuff, and, when full, wind the fish several times with tape, place in baking-pan, baste slightly with butter, and cover the bottom of pan with water; serve with the following sauce: Reduce the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs to a smooth paste, add two table-spoons olive-oil, half tea-spoon mustard, and pepper and vinegar to taste. - Miss H. D. M.
A plain nineteenth-century stuffed and baked fish with a cold egg sauce. The original gives neither oven temperature nor cooking time, which is the main thing a modern cook has to supply.
- Oven and timeBuckeye Cookery assumes you know your own range. Bake at 350F, allowing roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point once stuffed s- a 3 to 4 lb shad usually needs 45 to 55 minutes. It is done when the flesh flakes at the backbone channel and reads 145F.
- The bonesRemoving the backbone does nothing about shad's notorious intramuscular Y-bones, which run in rows through the fillets and are the reason boning a shad was once a specialist skill. Ask the fishmonger to bone it, or accept that diners will be picking bones out at the table.
- Finding shadAmerican shad runs are a fraction of what they were and some states restrict or close the fishery. Wild-caught shad appears in spring in Atlantic coastal markets; bluefish, mackerel or a whole striped bass takes the same treatment and the same timing.
- "Tape"Cotton tape sold by the yard for household use. Cotton kitchen twine does the same job; wind it around the body every two inches to hold the cavity closed, and cut it off before serving.
- Stuffing quantitiesNo amount of bread is given. For a 3 to 4 lb fish, about 4 cups of torn stale bread soaked and wrung out, with one large onion, will fill the cavity without packing it tight. Overstuffing slows the cooking and splits the belly.
- Water in the panEnough to film the bottom, no more s- it is there to keep the drippings from scorching, not to poach the fish. Top up once mid-bake if the pan runs dry, and baste with the buttery liquid.
- The sauceHard-boiled yolks mashed with oil, mustard and vinegar make what amounts to a cooked-yolk mayonnaise. Work the oil in a few drops at a time as you would for a raw-yolk emulsion, or it will stay grainy. Two yolks and two tablespoons of oil yields a scant quarter cup; double it for a whole fish.
- YieldA 3 to 4 lb stuffed shad serves four to six as a main course.
American shad (Alosa sapidissima) was one of the great cheap fishes of the nineteenth-century United States, running up the Atlantic rivers each spring in numbers that made it a seasonal fixture from Maine to Virginia; the roe was prized above the flesh, and the flesh was prized in spite of its bones. It turns up all the same in an Ohio compilation like Buckeye Cookery (first published in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping). The treatment here s- boned, bread-stuffed, bound with tape and baked s- is the standard whole-fish method of the period, applied to almost anything large enough to hold a filling, and the cold sauce of pounded hard yolks, oil, mustard and vinegar belongs to a family of household salad dressings that predate bottled mayonnaise. Like most entries in the book it carries a contributor's initials rather than a name.