Broiled Shad
Prepare, season with salt and pepper, and broil on a well-greased gridiron over a bed of clear, bright coals, for fifteen minutes or more. Keep the gridiron covered with a dripping pan while broiling to give a more delicious flavor. Butter well and serve.
The Butterick book assumes you know how to "prepare" a shad, which means the whole job: scaling, gutting, and splitting the fish flat down the back so it lies open on the grid. Everything else here is about managing a live fire.
- Split, not filletedA broiled shad in this period is split open and cooked bone-in, skin side down, so the frame holds the very soft flesh together. Shad is famously full of fine floating bones; a fishmonger can bone one for you, but a split fish on the grill is closer to what the book intends.
- The gridironA hinged wire fish basket over the grate is a practical modern equivalent, and it makes turning the fish without breaking it much easier. Grease it heavily and heat it before the fish goes on.
- "Clear, bright coals"Charcoal burned down to an even grey ash with no flame, which is roughly a medium-high fire. Flames will scorch the skin and the fat dripping from shad flares readily.
- The dripping pan lidInverting a metal pan over the fish traps heat and lets the top surface cook without turning, which may be why the recipe gives no instruction to flip the fish. Any heavy metal pan or a lidded kettle will do the same.
- Fifteen minutes "or more"The book's fifteen minutes is a reasonable guide for a split shad of two to three pounds over a medium-high fire, mostly skin side down. Judge it by the flesh going opaque and pulling from the bones, or about 145F at the thickest part; shad is fatty but dries out past that.
- Season early, butter lateSalt and pepper before the fish meets the fire. The butter goes on off the heat, as the book says, and should be plenty of it, melted over the hot fish with lemon if you like.
- The roeA spring shad may come with a roe sac, which was prized and was often cooked separately in butter. If yours has one, you may prefer to cook it apart from the fish.
- YieldOne shad of two to three pounds, split, serves three or four, with the bones accounting for a good deal of the weight.
American shad (Alosa sapidissima -- the species name means "most savory") runs up the Atlantic rivers to spawn in spring, and for two centuries its arrival was a fixed point in the eastern American calendar: shad planked on boards before open fires along the Delaware, Susquehanna and Connecticut, and shad shipped by the barrelful into city markets. That seasonal glut is why a general-purpose household manual like the Butterick book, published for a broad middle-class readership around the turn of the twentieth century, could hand out a three-sentence recipe and assume the cook had handled the fish before. The bones were the standing joke and the standing complaint; the roe, sold separately at a premium, was the reason many people bought shad at all. Overfishing and dammed rivers cut the runs drastically over the twentieth century, and some states have since closed their shad fisheries outright, so it is worth checking what is legal and available where you are before looking for one.