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Shad, Stuffed and Broiled
Scale a shad weighing about two pounds, empty and clean it carefully, opening it as little as possible in doing so. Fill it with veal or oyster forcemeat; sew up the body of the fish with soft cotton that the forcemeat may not escape. Wrap it in a sheet of paper that has been dipped in oil, and broil over a clear, gentle fire. Serve with caper sauce or with oil and vinegar. Time to broil, about an hour.
A Victorian broil of this kind means cooking on a gridiron over glowing coals, not under an overhead element, and the timing reflects a gentle fire at some distance from the fish. Two things need attention: the hour, and the source of the shad itself.
- The hour is the problemA stuffed two-pound shad is done in roughly 30 to 40 minutes over moderate heat, or in a 400F oven, once the thickest part of the flesh reaches 145F and the forcemeat is hot through. An hour over anything but the faintest fire leaves dry, chalky fish.
- "Broil" means grillRead this as a covered charcoal grill or a gridiron over coals kept low enough that the oiled paper scorches rather than flames. If you use an oven instead, bake rather than broil; the modern top-element broiler will burn the paper long before the stuffing warms.
- Oiled paperParchment brushed with oil does the same job as the original oiled sheet and is far less likely to catch. Two layers, folded at the edges, keeps the forcemeat and juices in place.
- ForcemeatVictorian veal forcemeat is typically breadcrumbs bound with suet or butter, egg and lemon zest, often with minced veal; oyster forcemeat is a similar base with chopped oysters folded in. Both may contain raw meat or shellfish, so the stuffing should reach 165F, which is part of why the fish needs a full half hour rather than fifteen minutes.
- "Soft cotton"Undyed cotton butcher's twine. Anything synthetic will melt, and coloured string can bleed into the flesh.
- Caper sauceIn Victorian usage this is a butter or melted-butter sauce (flour, butter, fish stock or water) with capers and a little of their vinegar stirred in at the end. The alternative given, oil and vinegar, is simply a sharp dressing spooned over the hot fish.
- Shad bonesShad is notoriously fine-boned; the intramuscular bones run in rows and are not removable by ordinary filleting. Serve it on the bone as intended and warn the table.
- Sourcing and substitutesAmerican shad stocks have collapsed and commercial fisheries are closed or tightly limited in much of the eastern United States; the European allis and twaite shad are protected species. Buy only from a legal commercial source, or use mackerel, bluefish or a small bass, all of which take stuffing and a grill in the same way.
- YieldA two-pound stuffed fish serves two generously or three modestly.
Shad is an anadromous herring that runs up rivers to spawn in spring, and for centuries its arrival was a calendar event on both sides of the Atlantic: the American shad, Alosa sapidissima, on the Delaware, Hudson and Connecticut, and the allis and twaite shad on the Severn, the Loire and the Rhine. It was cheap, abundant and seasonal, which is exactly the kind of fish Victorian cookery books treat generously. The bones were always the complaint and the roe always the prize, and the answers often given were long, slow cooking and a stuffing to keep the lean flesh moist, both of which this recipe uses. Wrapping a delicate fish in oiled paper before it meets the gridiron, as this recipe does, is the same logic as cooking en papillote. The abundance did not last: dams, pollution and overfishing had thinned the European runs by the twentieth century, and the American runs were already collapsing from the late nineteenth, so a dish once considered everyday food is now genuinely hard to make with the fish it names.