To Fry Shad
Clean and hang in a cool place. When ready to use wash thoroughly, cut up and sprinkle lightly with flour, pepper, salt, and fry with lard.--Mrs. R-- To Roast Shad.
Fill the inside with forcemeat, sew it up and tie it on a board, not pine, cover with bread crumbs, a little salt, and pepper, and place before the fire. When done one side turn it; when sufficiently done, pull out the thread; dish and serve with drawn butter and parsley.--Mrs. D.
Two shad recipes in one entry: a plain pan-fry and a planked roast before an open fire. Both assume a whole spring shad, a fish full of fine bones and rich oily flesh, brought in the same day it is cooked.
- The bones are the hingeAmerican shad carries rows of fine intermuscular bones that ordinary filleting does not remove. The recipe says only to "cut up" the fish, which leaves those bones in the pieces; eat with care.
- Hanging in a cool placeAn unheated larder or springhouse, not aging in any deliberate sense; the recipe gives no interval. Shad is very oily and turns rancid quickly, so refrigerate and cook within a day of purchase.
- Frying with lardLard was the default fat and gives a clean crust at high heat. Any fat with a smoke point above 375F works. The flour dredge is meant to be light, a dusting rather than a coating.
- "Place before the fire"The fish is tied to a board and stood before the hearth, turned once. The recipe specifies only that the board not be pine, presumably because resinous smoke would taint the fish; a non-resinous hardwood is the obvious substitute. There is no oven equivalent in the original.
- ForcemeatIn this period that means a bread stuffing bound with butter and egg, seasoned with herbs, sometimes enriched with the shad roe. It is not a modern sausage forcemeat.
- Drawn butterNot simply melted butter. Nineteenth-century drawn butter is a light sauce of butter, flour and water or fish stock, whisked smooth. The recipe pairs it with parsley but does not say how the parsley is used.
- Sourcing the fishWild American shad is under harvest restriction or outright moratorium in much of its former range, including parts of the Chesapeake. Where it is unavailable, a whole bluefish, mackerel or small salmon takes the same treatment.
- YieldA whole shad runs 3 to 5 lb and serves four to six, more if the roe is served alongside.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials, was published when the spring shad run was still the great annual event of the Chesapeake and its rivers. Shad ascend the Potomac, Rappahannock and James to spawn from late winter into spring, and for generations the runs supplied fish cheap enough to salt down by the barrel and fresh enough, for a few weeks, to fry every day. Planking, the technique behind the second recipe, is often said to derive from Native practice along the Atlantic seaboard, though the lineage is traditional rather than documented; the communal shad plankings still held in Virginia use much the same method of standing a split fish on a hardwood board before a hardwood fire. That the recipes are credited only to "Mrs. R--" and "Mrs. D." is characteristic of the book, which is a collection of household practice rather than an authored cookbook, and it explains the brevity: any Virginia housekeeper of 1877 already knew what a shad looked like and how long it wanted.