Baked Shad
Open and clean the fish, cut off head (or not as preferred) cut out the backbone from the head to within two inches of the tail, and fill with the following mixture: Soak stale bread in water, squeeze dry; cut a large onion in pieces, fry in butter, chop fine, add the bread, two ounces of butter, salt, pepper, and a little parsley or sage; heat thoroughly, and when taken from the fire, add two yolks of well-beaten eggs; stuff, and, when full, wind the fish several times with tape, place in baking-pan, baste slightly with butter, and cover the bottom of pan with water; serve with the following sauce: Reduce the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs to a smooth paste, add two table-spoons olive-oil, half tea-spoon mustard, and pepper and vinegar to taste. - Miss H. D. M.
A whole boned and stuffed shad, baked in a shallow pan with a little water, and served with what amounts to an early egg-and-oil dressing. The original assumes you know your fish and your fire, so the numbers below fill in what it leaves out.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book predates thermostats. A moderate oven, 350F, suits a stuffed whole fish; the pan of water underneath keeps the bottom from scorching and steams the belly cavity.
- TimingReckon roughly 10 minutes per inch at the thickest point, which is about 40-50 minutes for a stuffed 3-4 lb shad. The flesh should flake at the backbone line; because the stuffing carries raw egg yolk, take it to 165F at the centre of the cavity rather than the 145F used for plain fish.
- Getting the fishAmerican shad is not a supermarket staple and some Atlantic river fisheries are closed or tightly regulated; buy from a fishmonger in spring or ask for it filleted and boned. Bluefish, whole trout or a small salmon take the same treatment.
- The bonesShad carries floating intramuscular bones in addition to the backbone. The recipe's cut takes out the backbone to open a cavity for the stuffing; it does not debone the fish, and if the fine bones bother you a fishmonger can do the full shad-boning job, which is a specialist cut.
- "Tape"Narrow cotton tape of this kind was one of the trussing materials in use when the book was written. Plain cotton kitchen string, wound at two-inch intervals, does the same work and cuts away cleanly after baking.
- Quantities for the stuffingNone are given for the bread. Four to five cups of stale bread, soaked and wrung out, plus the onion and 2 oz butter, fills a 3-4 lb fish with a little left over; bake any surplus alongside in a buttered dish.
- The egg yolksThey are stirred into stuffing already taken off the heat, then cooked through inside the fish. Let the mixture cool a few minutes first so the yolks bind rather than scramble.
- The sauceHard yolks, oil, mustard and vinegar make a thick, grainy dressing of the sauce-tartare type. Work the oil in a spoonful at a time to keep it smooth, and slacken with vinegar until it pours; as it is never cooked it will be served at room temperature or cooler.
- YieldA 3-4 lb stuffed shad serves four to six as a main course.
Shad was the great spring fish of the Atlantic seaboard and its rivers, running up the Delaware, Susquehanna, Potomac and the Carolina and Virginia streams in numbers large enough to reach tables of every kind, and shad planking and shad roe became fixtures of the Chesapeake and Tidewater spring. Its drawback is the notorious lattice of fine bones, and nineteenth-century cooks dealt with the fish in various ways -- planking it, baking it long, or, as here, splitting it and taking the backbone out before stuffing. The Dixie Cook Book, credited to Estelle Woods Wilcox and published in the 1880s, mixes contributed household receipts with material reworked from her earlier Buckeye Cookery, and a good many of its recipes carry a contributor's initials, as this one does. The cold yolk-and-oil sauce is of the same family as the tartar sauce later standard with fried fish.