Shad, to Dress
INGREDIENTS.shad, oil, pepper per and salt.
Scale, empty and wash the fish carefully, and make two or three incisions across the back. Season it with pepper and salt, and let it remain in oil for 1/2 hour. Broil it on both sides over a clear fire, and serve with caper sauce. This fish is much esteemed by the French, and by them is considered excellent.
TIME.-Nearly 1 hour.
SEASONABLE from April to June.
A plain broiled fish with an oil marinade, notable mainly for what it leaves out: any acknowledgement that shad is one of the boniest fish in the market, and a cooking time that would reduce it to dust.
- The time is wrongThe time is odd -- "Nearly 1 hour" may well be counting the half-hour in oil, though the book does not say. Under a hot broiler a split shad of 2-3 lb needs 12-18 minutes total; fillets need 6-8 minutes, skin side first, and are done when the flesh just parts.
- "A clear fire"Coals burned down past the flame stage, so no smoke or flare-up on the oiled skin. A gas or electric broiler set high with the rack 4-5 inches from the element is the equivalent, or a charcoal grill once the coals have greyed over.
- The bones are the real problemShad has floating intramuscular bones in rows that no amount of careful eating will defeat. Buy it boned by the fishmonger, which is a specialist skill and worth paying for.
- Why slash the backThe incisions let heat into a thick-bodied oily fish so the centre cooks before the skin blackens. Cut down to the bone at the thickest part, no deeper.
- The oil bathHalf an hour in plain oil with pepper and salt is a marinade for moisture and non-stick purposes, not flavour. Drain well before it goes over the fire or the drips will flare.
- Caper sauceIn Beeton this means melted-butter sauce, a flour-and-butter roux thinned with water or fish stock, with capers and a little of their vinegar stirred in at the end. Warm butter with capers and lemon does the same job in a fifth of the time.
- The roeIf the fish comes with roe, it was a prized item in the period. It is dense and cooks slowly; broil it separately over gentler heat rather than alongside the fish.
- AvailabilityAmerican shad runs are managed and in some Atlantic states the fishery is closed, so supply is seasonal and regional rather than reliable. If you cannot get it, the recipe works on any oily spring fish of similar size, mackerel especially.
- YieldA whole shad of 2-3 lb serves two or three as a main course.
Shad is a river-running herring, and Beeton's note that the French esteem it reflects a genuine divide: alose was a spring delicacy on the Loire and Gironde, grilled over vine cuttings and served with sorrel to help with the bones, while in England it was less celebrated, though shad ran in the Thames and Severn and Beeton prints this recipe. The Latin name of the American species, Alosa sapidissima, translates as "most savoury", and the spring run up rivers from the Connecticut to the Delaware made it one of the cheapest and most abundant fish on the nineteenth-century American table, cheap enough to be considered food for the poor before overfishing and dammed rivers turned it into a scarcity. The April-to-June season Beeton gives is simply the spawning run, when the fish crowd into the rivers.