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To Broil Shad
Clean, wash, and split the shad, and wipe it dry. Sprinkle with pepper and salt, and place it over a clear, slow fire, with the skin down so as to retain the juice; put on a clean gridiron, rubbed with lard. Turn it when nearly done; take up, and season with a generous piece of butter, salt, and pepper to taste.--Mrs. S.
A gridiron recipe from the era of open hearths and coal ranges, which translates directly to a charcoal grill and reasonably well to an oven broiler. The instruction that matters is the slow, clear fire: shad is oily and will flare and scorch over anything fierce.
- Clear, slow fireA "clear" fire means coals burned down past flame, with no smoke and no fresh fuel. On a charcoal grill, wait until the coals are ashed over and spread thin; under a broiler, set the rack 6-8 inches down rather than at the top.
- Split shadSplitting means butterflying the whole fish along the backbone so it lies flat, skin side down, rather than filleting. A fishmonger will do it, and some will bone it if asked, though shad boning is a specialist job and not every counter can manage it.
- Skin down, and mostly stay thereThe skin acts as the cooking vessel here. Give it nearly all the time, then a brief turn at the end for color, or skip the turn entirely under a broiler, where the fish cooks through without being flipped.
- Rub the gridiron with lardAny high-smoke-point fat does the same job. Oil the grate, not the fish, or the drips will flare into the oily skin.
- TimingThe original gives none. A split shad of 2-3 lb takes roughly 10-15 minutes over moderate coals; it is done when the flesh at the thickest point has turned opaque and parts from the bone. Shad dries out quickly past that point.
- BonesAmerican shad carries several rows of floating intermuscular bones that no amount of careful cooking dissolves. Boning is a specialist knife skill; unboned, the fish is eaten cautiously and in good light.
- Finishing butterThe "generous piece of butter" goes on off the heat and melts into the hot flesh. A squeeze of lemon is a common modern addition and does no harm to the intent.
- YieldA whole split shad feeds two to three as a main course. Shad roe, if the fish comes with it, is cooked separately and gently.
Shad ran up the Chesapeake and the Virginia rivers every spring in numbers that made them a cheap, seasonal glut, and planked, broiled and baked shad are fixtures of nineteenth-century Southern and Mid-Atlantic cookbooks for that reason. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, which is why this one closes with an initial rather than a byline; the book is less a single author's method than a directory of what particular households actually did. The plainness here is characteristic of shad cookery generally: a fish rich enough in oil to need no basting was treated with salt, pepper, fire and butter, and shad planking suppers along the tidal rivers still follow much the same logic. Atlantic shad stocks have fallen sharply since, and the spring abundance the recipe assumes no longer exists.