Home › Baked Fish › Planked Shad with Creamed Roe
Planked Shad with Creamed Roe
Select a roe shad and prepare same as Planked Shad.
Parboil roe in salted, acidulated water twenty minutes. Remove outside membrane, and mash. Melt three tablespoons butter, add one teaspoon finely chopped shallot, and cook five minutes; add roe, sprinkle with one and one-half tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually one-third cup cream. Cook slowly five minutes, add two egg yolks and season highly with salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Remove shad from oven, spread thin part with roe mixture, cover with buttered crumbs, and return to oven to brown crumbs. Garnish with mashed potatoes forced through a pastry bag and tube, small tomatoes, slices of lemon and parsley.
A spring dish in two parts: the split shad cooked on a hardwood plank, and its roe turned into a rich gratin spread over the thin belly flesh. The roe sauce is the part that needs judgment.
- The hinge: the egg yolksAdd the two yolks off the heat, stirring hard, and do not let the mixture simmer afterward. The sauce only needs to hold together long enough to spread; the final trip to the oven is to brown crumbs, not to cook the roe again.
- Parboiling the roePrick the membrane in two or three places before it goes into the water or the sacs may burst. Twenty minutes at a bare simmer suits a large pair of lobes; a small set is firm in eight to ten, and overcooked roe turns grainy no matter how much cream follows.
- Acidulated waterWater with about a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar per quart, salted. It firms the roe and keeps it pale.
- The plankAn untreated hardwood board, oak or hickory, an inch thick, heated and oiled before the fish goes on it. Never a plank sold for grilling with any finish on it. A heavy oiled baking sheet works if a plank is out of reach, though you lose the point of the dish.
- Oven heatFarmer directs planked fish into a 'hot oven' without stating a temperature; a modern equivalent is roughly 450F, about 20 to 25 minutes for a split shad of three to four pounds, then a few minutes more to color the crumbs. The flesh should just flake at the backbone.
- Shallot and butterCook the shallot in the butter without letting it brown, then let the flour cook a minute before the cream goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty.
- Buttered crumbsDry, fine crumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly a quarter to a third as much butter as crumbs by volume. Fresh soft crumbs will steam rather than crisp.
- SourcingRoe shad means a female American shad, sold whole with the roe intact, and only for a few weeks in spring; many fishmongers now sell the roe separately. Shad is famously bony, so the fish is split and served off the plank in wide pieces rather than filleted.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a split shad of about three to four pounds with its roe would serve roughly four as a main course.
Shad, Alosa sapidissima, ran up the Atlantic rivers in enormous numbers each spring, and planking the fish before an open fire is a technique generally traced to Native American practice along the Delaware, Connecticut and Susquehanna, later adopted for civic outdoor feasts of the sort still held as the Virginia Shad Planking. By the time Fannie Farmer compiled the Boston Cooking School book in the 1890s, the plank had moved indoors: a heated oak board, a hot oven, and a border of mashed potatoes piped from a pastry bag, a common flourish for planked fish and steaks in that period. Shad roe was widely prized, and treating it as a creamed gratin rather than simply frying it in bacon fat places this at the more formal, French-influenced end of the book. Shad runs have since fallen sharply from their nineteenth-century levels, which is why a whole roe shad is now a seasonal luxury rather than the cheap spring fish it was here.