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Broiled Shad with Sorrel
Scale and draw a shad which has a soft roe, cut off the fins, wipe it, and make incisions on both sides. Place the shad in a deep dish, baste it with oil, season to taste with salt and pepper, and let it macerate for one hour. Broil the fish over a clear fire, turning and basting it frequently with the oil in which it is soaked. Boil a quantity of sorrel as for garnish, make a border of it on a hot dish, place the shad in the center, pour over a little parsley sauce and serve, accompanied by a sauceboatful of the sauce.
A plain grilled fish with a sharp green foil, and everything depends on two things: getting a whole shad in the first place, and not overcooking it. The sorrel is a sauce disguised as a garnish.
- "A soft roe" means a male fishSoft roe is milt, so Oscar is specifying a buck shad rather than the roe-laden hen prized for its egg sacs. Bucks generally run smaller than hens; a whole one serves two to three, a larger fish four.
- Sourcing the fishAmerican shad is not the everyday market fish it was in 1896, and several Atlantic states have closed or restricted their fisheries, so availability varies by region and season. Ask a fishmonger for whole shad in spring; bluefish or mackerel take the same treatment and the same sorrel.
- The bonesShad has an intricate row of floating intramuscular bones, and hand-boning it is a specialist trade. The incisions "on both sides" are the old workaround: scoring is traditionally said to let the heat reach the fine bones and soften them, and it may help the thick shoulder cook through before the tail dries.
- Macerate means marinateAn hour in oil, salt and pepper, at cool room temperature or refrigerated. Nothing acidic is involved, so the flesh will not firm up or cure; the oil is largely there to keep the fish from sticking and to carry the seasoning.
- "A clear fire"Charcoal burned down past the flames to steady, ash-covered heat, with no smoke or flare-up. A hot grill or a broiler at its highest setting does the same work; a whole shad of this size will need appreciably longer than the 4-6 minutes a side a split fish takes, and is done when the flesh at the thickest point just flakes. Shad is oily and forgiving of high heat but turns dry and cottony if held on the fire.
- Sorrel cooks down to almost nothing"A quantity" is not idle: sorrel collapses like spinach, only more so. Reckon a pound of leaves for a modest border on the platter. Oscar says to boil it. It will go from bright green to olive-khaki, which is the acid doing its work and is not a fault.
- Parsley sauceMost likely a white sauce or veloute finished with chopped parsley and butter. A light bechamel, or melted butter with lemon and a good handful of parsley, both serve.
- ServingSorrel is acidic enough that an iron or aluminium pan will taint it; use stainless or enamel. Bring the platter to the table hot, since the oil-basted skin loses its crispness fast.
Shad ran up the Hudson, Delaware and Connecticut rivers in enormous spring numbers through the nineteenth century, cheap enough to be called a poor man's fish. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms in the 1890s, shad and shad roe had climbed onto luxury menus as a strictly seasonal delicacy, appearing for a few weeks each spring and then vanishing. The sorrel is the French half of the dish: alose à l'oseille is a classic of the Loire and the Gironde, where the leaf's acidity was traditionally said to help dissolve the fish's notorious small bones. Whether it does anything of the kind is doubtful, but the pairing of a rich oily fish with a sour green is sound cooking, and it shows how readily Oscar set a New York river fish inside a Parisian formula.