Shad, Baked
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons. A medium-sized shad, lb. of salt pork, 1 oz. of butter, 2 oz. of bread-crumbs, a glass of port wine, flour, pepper and salt. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 3d.
Cut the fish open at the gills and wash and scrape it clean, then wipe it with a dry cloth. Make a stuffing with half the pork, the bread-crumbs, chopped parsley and a seasoning of pepper and salt. Fill the fish with this, sew it up, and dredge it with flour, and lay the rest of the pork, cut very thin, over it. Bake 40 minutes in a tin, then lay in a hot dish. Put butter, seasoning, hot water and the wine into the tin to make some gravy, and when it boils, pour it over the fish.
TIME.-40 minutes to bake the fish.
SEASONABLE from April to June.
A straightforward stuffed whole fish, but the original assumes a cook who knows shad — an oily, exceptionally bony fish that rewards a hot dry oven and thin sheets of pork fat.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the recipe predates thermostats. Bake at 400F; 40 minutes suits a shad of about 3 lb, roasting until the thickest flesh at the backbone reaches 145F.
- The salt pork is the hingeShad is fatty but the flesh dries at the surface, and the thin sheets of pork laid over the top are what keep it moist and give the pan gravy its body. Cut it as close to translucent as your knife allows, and do not substitute streaky bacon unless you want the smoke flavour.
- The quantity of porkThe fraction has dropped out of the ingredient line, which reads only 'lb. of salt pork'. Half a pound (8 oz) is the likeliest reading: half worked into the stuffing, half sliced over the fish.
- ParsleyChopped parsley appears in the method but not in the ingredient list, and no quantity is given. A small handful, finely chopped, is a reasonable amount.
- BonesShad has a notorious lattice of floating intramuscular bones that no amount of baking dissolves. Ask a fishmonger to bone it, or serve it as the Victorians did and warn the table.
- Port in the gravyA "glass" in this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz. Add it with the hot water to the roasting tin; the recipe says only to pour the gravy over the fish once it boils.
- Sewing upKitchen string and a trussing needle work; so do three or four short skewers laced with string. Remove before serving.
- Season and substitutesApril to June is the shad run, and the fish is not widely sold outside it. Mackerel or a whole small bluefish takes the same treatment, though a smaller fish will need proportionately less time.
- YieldAs written, six portions from one fish.
Shad is an anadromous member of the herring family that runs up rivers to spawn in spring, and its brief season made it one of the great seasonal fish markets on both sides of the Atlantic. British cooks knew it chiefly from the Severn and the Continent, but the dish as given here stuffed with breadcrumbs and salt pork, barded with more pork, baked whole reads as an American recipe absorbed into the Beeton canon, where shad planked or baked with pork was a standard treatment along the eastern seaboard. The average cost of 2s. 3d. and the note "seasonable from April to June" belong to the reference apparatus characteristic of Beeton, telling a household not only how to cook a thing but when it could be got and what it ought to fetch.