Creamed Shad
Free a pint of cold cooked shad from bones and flake it very fine. Make a white sauce by cooking together a tablespoonful of butter with 1 of flour, and when nicely blended, add a pint of rich milk. Now add a few drops of onion juice, and pour slowly upon the well-beaten yolks of 2 eggs. Season with salt, pepper, and a teaspoonful of minced parsley. Stir the shad into the sauce, then turn into a well-buttered pudding-dish, sprinkle thickly with fine bread crumbs, and bake about twenty minutes.
A Victorian way of using up the tail end of a poached or planked shad. The original assumes you know what oven to use and how to handle egg yolks in hot sauce, so those are the two things worth spelling out.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, and the recipe uses no oven term to translate. A moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 350-375F, suits the stated twenty minutes: long enough to set the yolks and colour the crumbs, and gentle enough to reduce the risk of the custard curdling.
- Do not let the sauce boil after the eggs go inThis is the hinge. The instruction to "pour slowly upon the well-beaten yolks" means tempering — dribble the hot sauce into the yolks while whisking, not the reverse. Once combined, keep it off direct heat; the egg thickens in the oven.
- A pint of flaked fishMeasured loose in a pint cup, that is roughly 10 oz of cooked flesh, from a piece of raw shad of about 1 lb. Any cooked flaky fish works the same way.
- The sauce is deliberately thinOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a pint of milk is a very light bechamel by modern ratios. That is intentional — the two yolks and the fish do most of the binding. Do not be tempted to double the roux or the result turns pasty.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavour without texture: grate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and use the liquid. The recipe calls for only a few drops. A pinch of grated shallot is the nearest substitute.
- Shad todayAmerican shad runs have declined sharply and several Atlantic states have closed or restricted the fishery, so fresh shad is seasonal and regional at best. Mackerel, bluefish, salmon or any cooked white fish stands in without changing the method.
- BonesShad is notoriously bony, with fine intramuscular bones that survive ordinary cooking. Flaking "very fine" by hand, between the fingers, is the surest way to find them.
- Crumbs and yieldDot the crumb topping with a little butter or they stay pale and dusty. The fish and sauce together make about a quart of mixture, so use a dish with a little room above that; it serves four as a light main course.