Baked Shad
Open the shad down the back, wash well and salt it; wipe dry and rub inside and out with a little cayenne pepper. Prepare a stuffing of bread, seasoned with pepper, salt, thyme, or parsley, celery-seed, a little chopped onion, piece of butter, size of a walnut.
Tie up the fish and put in a baking pan with one pint water (to a good sized fish) and butter, size of a hen's egg. Sprinkle with flour, baste well and bake slowly an hour and a half.--Mrs. J.H.F.
A plain Chesapeake baked shad, written for a cook who knew what a whole shad looked like and how long a wood-fired oven held its heat. A few conversions and one adjustment to timing make it workable.
- "Bake slowly"A slow oven in this period is usually reckoned at somewhere around 300F, perhaps 325F at the outside. The low heat matters here: the pint of water in the pan makes the operation part braise, part roast, and a hot oven would boil it away and dry the fish.
- Butter measurementsA piece of butter the size of a walnut is usually reckoned at 1 to 2 tablespoons; the size of a hen's egg at about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Period tables differ, so treat both as approximate.
- The hour and a halfA dressed shad of 3 to 4 lb is cooked through in 45 to 60 minutes at 325F. The longer time in the original assumes a larger fish -- shad ran to 5 or 6 lb -- and an oven that lost heat every time the door opened. Go by the flesh: opaque and just parting from the backbone.
- The bonesShad is famously full of fine intramuscular bones, and there is a long tradition of baking it for hours to soften them. An hour and a half will not do that. Either buy a boned fillet-side shad from a fishmonger who knows the cut, or eat it carefully as written.
- Opening down the backSplitting along the spine rather than the belly gives a flat fish that lies open for stuffing and cooks evenly. Ask for it that way; most fish counters will butterfly on request.
- The stuffingNo quantity is given. For a 4 lb fish, about 3 cups of dry breadcrumbs or torn stale bread, a small onion, a teaspoon of celery seed and a good handful of herbs is in proportion. Keep it loose -- packed stuffing in a flat split fish will not heat through before the flesh overcooks.
- Tie it upKitchen twine at three or four points, or trussing skewers. Without them the split fish opens in the pan and the stuffing washes into the water.
- Basting and the flourThe flour sprinkled over the top browns and thickens the pan liquid into a light gravy as you baste. Baste every 15 minutes or so and add water if the pan threatens to go dry.
- YieldA good-sized shad with stuffing serves four to six.
Shad was one of the great spring events of Virginia and Maryland: the fish run up the Potomac, James and Rappahannock to spawn, and for a few weeks they were so plentiful and so cheap that they fed everyone from planters' tables to the field hands. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878 from contributions by named and initialed Virginia housewives -- hence the "Mrs. J.H.F." -- gives several shad recipes, which is a fair measure of how central the fish was to the regional calendar. The species, Alosa sapidissima, was named for its flavour; the roe was prized separately and is often said to have fetched a higher price than the fish. Later generations of cooks pushed the slow baking here to four, six, even ten hours, on the principle that long moist heat dissolves the notorious bones, a technique generally traced to riverside cooks along the Chesapeake rather than to any single published source. Overfishing and dammed rivers cut the runs drastically in the twentieth century, and shad is now a seasonal specialty rather than the spring commonplace this recipe assumes.