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Shad, Stuffed and Baked
Wash, empty, and scale a shad, and fill the inside with veal or oyster forcemeat, or with a forcemeat prepared as follows. Moisten two slices of crumb of bread with hot water, press the water from it, then beat it up with a slice of butter, three or four sage-leaves chopped small, and a little pepper and salt. Sew up the body of the fish with soft cotton, and dredge it well with flour. Lay it in a dripping-pan upon a trivet, seasoning it with pepper and salt; lay little pieces of butter here and there upon it, and pour a pint of water round it to baste it with. Bake in a quick oven, and baste frequently, and if necessary add a little more water. Mix a heaped tea-spoonful of flour to a smooth paste with a little water, work into it a slice of fresh butter, and mix with it half a pint of the gravy in the pan. Put it into a saucepan stir it till it thickens, and add a table-spoonful of lemon-juice. Put the fish on a hot dish, strain the sauce over it, garnish with parsley and lemon, and send mashed potatoes to table with it. Time to bake, one hour.
A straightforward whole baked fish with a bread-and-sage stuffing and a pan gravy thickened at the end. The Victorian phrasing hides a few things worth pinning down before you start.
- Sourcing the fishAmerican shad (Alosa sapidissima) is what most sellers mean, and it runs in spring. The European allis shad is fully protected in the UK and twaite shad is also protected; neither should be taken. Buy from a fishmonger rather than from a river.
- Oven heatA "quick oven" is usually read as roughly 400-425F (200-220C). At that heat a 3-4 lb shad may well be done inside the stated hour; start checking at 40-45 minutes for 145F at the thickest part behind the head.
- The bonesShad is famously latticed with fine floating bones. An hour's baking will not soften them; the long, slow multi-hour bakings said to dissolve shad bones are a separate tradition. Ask for a boned shad, or serve carefully and warn the table.
- "A slice of butter"An unhelpfully loose Victorian measure. Read it as about 1 oz (30 g) each time it appears - once in the forcemeat, once in the sauce.
- Liquid measuresCassell's is a British book, so its pint is 20 fl oz and its half-pint 10 fl oz. If you would rather work in US measures, use 2 1/2 cups of water in the pan and 1 1/4 cups of pan gravy for the sauce.
- Sewing up"Soft cotton" is best read as undyed cotton kitchen twine. Synthetic string may scorch or melt at oven heat. Trussing needles are easiest, but a few loops tied around the body will hold the stuffing just as well.
- The trivet and the waterThe trivet is simply a rack that keeps the fish clear of the liquid, so it roasts rather than poaches while the water below supplies basting liquor and stops the drippings burning. Top it up as it evaporates or the gravy will be bitter.
- The sauceFlour worked to a paste with water, enriched with butter and let down with pan liquor, rather than a roux. Work the paste into the strained gravy off the heat, then bring it back gently; adding it to a boiling pan gives lumps. The lemon juice goes in once the sauce has thickened.
- YieldA whole shad of 3-4 lb serves four generously with mashed potato, allowing for the bones.
Shad is an anadromous herring relative that runs up rivers to spawn in spring, and its arrival was a fixed point in the Atlantic calendar on both sides of the ocean - the Latin name of the American species, sapidissima, simply means "most savoury". By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century the great British shad runs on the Severn and the Wye were already thinning under the pressure of weirs and pollution, while American rivers were still landing the fish in enormous quantities and exporting salted barrels of it; the entry reads as a British recipe for a fish that was becoming, in Britain, a memory. The treatment here - a bread forcemeat sharpened with sage, a dripping-pan, a flour-and-butter gravy finished with lemon - is the standard Victorian method for any large baked fish.