And Parsley
placing the roe beside the fish on the plank, or the roe can be boiled, mixed with a little white sauce well seasoned, and spread over the shad where the flesh is thinnest. This latter should be done just before the fish is finished; the dressed roe being covered with buttered crumbs. These will be sufficiently browned when the fish itself is done.
This is the tail end of a planked shad recipe — the page picks up midway through the instructions for the roe, which was always cooked and served alongside the fish. The notes below fill in what the fragment assumes you already know.
- What is missingThe passage begins partway through the instructions, after the shad has been prepared and set on the plank; the fragment itself does not describe those earlier steps. Planking means cooking the fish on a thick untreated hardwood board such as oak or hickory, before a fire or in a hot oven, though this page gives neither a temperature nor a time.
- The plank itselfUse untreated hardwood, thick rather than thin, oiled and heated before the fish goes on; thin softwood grilling planks are not suited to prolonged oven heat. The board was customarily carried to table with the fish on it.
- Boiling the roeShad roe is two lobes in a thin membrane that bursts and spatters if rushed. Poach it gently in barely simmering salted water with a squeeze of lemon for 8-10 minutes, then drain and cool before breaking it up. A hard boil toughens the eggs into grit.
- White sauceUsually a plain bechamel: equal butter and flour cooked together, milk whisked in, simmered until it coats a spoon. "Well seasoned" is doing real work here — salt, pepper, a little lemon and cayenne, or the roe mixture reads as flat and chalky.
- The timing hingeThe roe mixture goes on only near the end, as the recipe states. Spread over the thin belly flesh it acts as insulation, and the buttered crumbs need only the last stretch of cooking to colour — the recipe expects them to be browned exactly when the fish is done. Put it on at the start and the crumbs will darken long before the thicker flesh is cooked.
- Buttered crumbsDry, coarse crumbs tossed in melted butter, not fresh soft crumbs, which go pasty under a sauce. Roughly 2 tablespoons butter to a cup of crumbs.
- Sourcing shadAmerican shad is far scarcer than it was in 1900 and roe shad is a short spring season; several Atlantic river fisheries are closed or restricted. Roe is sold frozen in some markets. Shad is famously bony, and the intricate lateral bone rows are not removed by ordinary filleting.
- YieldThe recipe states no size or number of servings; a whole planked shad with its roe would be treated as a dish for a small table.
Planked shad belongs to the shad-bake tradition of the Connecticut, Hudson and Delaware rivers, where the spring run was met with fish nailed to oak boards and propped around an open fire — a method generally traced to Native American practice along the Atlantic seaboard and taken up by colonial and later civic shad bakes. In time the plank migrated indoors to the gas or coal range, and is often said to have become a genteel restaurant presentation, the board carried to table with the fish still sizzling on it. The insistence on serving the roe with the fish reflects how the two were sold and valued together: a roe shad fetched more than a buck shad, and the roe was treated as the delicacy, here stretched with a white sauce and crumbs to blanket the thin, easily overcooked belly flesh.