Potted Shad
Cut the fish as for frying; pack in a stone jar with layers of mixed spices, seasoning with salt; after the jar is filled, pour vinegar over; cover tightly with a cloth. Put the jar in a large pot of water and boil until the fish is thoroughly done.
A nice relish for tea.--Mrs. C.L.T.
A vinegar-and-spice potting done in a water bath, of the kind Virginia households used to make the notoriously bony shad edible. The method is sound, but two things need saying: how long it really takes, and how long the result keeps.
- The point is the bonesShad carries a great many fine intramuscular bones, and long cooking in hot, acidified liquid softens them until they can be eaten. The receipt gives no time; "thoroughly done" for the fish alone would be far short of what the bones need, and preparations of this kind are generally simmered for several hours. Undercook it and you get sharp bones in an acid sauce.
- Getting shadAtlantic shad is not the market fish it was in 1877 -- Chesapeake and many East Coast fisheries have been under moratorium or tight restriction for decades, so check what is legal and available where you are. Mackerel, bluefish, or fat herring take the same treatment well.
- "Cut as for frying"Crosswise steaks about an inch thick, or the boned sides cut into serving pieces. Uniform thickness matters more than usual here, since everything has to soften at the same rate.
- Mixed spicesWhole pickling spice: black peppercorns, allspice, mustard seed, a few cloves, blade mace, bay. Use whole, not ground -- ground spice turns the liquid muddy over three hours of simmering.
- The vinegarStandard 5 percent cider vinegar is consistent in a way home-made vinegar of the period would not have been, and may well be stronger, though period strengths were variable and are not documented. Half vinegar, half water gives a milder result and is still plenty acidic.
- The vesselA stone jar means a glazed crock or stoneware jar set down in a pot of water, so nothing metal touches the vinegar. A wide-mouth glass canning jar works; stand it on a folded cloth or rack so it is not on the bare pot bottom, and keep the water level about two-thirds up the jar, topping up as it boils away.
- Do not treat it as shelf stableThe cloth cover was for keeping dust out, not for sealing. This is not a canning process -- there are no measured quantities, no known final acidity, and no sealed jar. Cool it, cover it, refrigerate it, and eat it within about a week.
- Yield and servingThe receipt gives no quantities; a fish of a few pounds will roughly fill a two-quart jar and serve several as the "relish for tea" intended: cold, out of its own jelly and spiced liquid, with bread and butter.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives -- hence the initials at the end of the receipt -- appeared when the spring shad run was still one of the great cheap harvests of the Chesapeake and the James. Shad were caught in great quantity and were, notoriously, almost impossible to bone, which is why regional cookbooks of the period offer various versions of the long, slow acid cooking that softens the small bones; the same logic survives in the baked-for-six-hours recipes still printed today. "Potted" in this period means packed close in a jar and cooked or sealed there to keep for a while, as with potted meats under butter -- the vessel names the dish rather than the oven. That such a preparation is offered as a tea relish suggests that in this household the evening meal could be a cold, light spread of pickles, breads and preserved fish rather than another cooked dinner.