No. 1256

Shad, with Sorrel Puree and Sorrel Leaves

Alose a la Puree d'Oseille et aux Feuilles d'Oseille

With Sorrel Puree.—Trim the fillets of shad into half hearts, cook them as in No. 1253, and then dress in a circle; garnish the center with some sorrel puree (No. 728).

With Sorrel Leaves.—Fry two ounces of chopped onions, moisten with fish broth, and add half a pound of sorrel leaves; lay the whole shad on top of this with two ounces of butter put on the cover, closing it hermetically with a little dough made with flour and water, and cook it in a moderate oven for five hours. Serve the fish whole with the broth reduced.

← No. 1255 Planked Shad, Ravigote Butter Shad, Herring & Mackerel No. 1257 Sheepshead a la Bechamel →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two preparations under one heading: a plated fillet dish that leans on Ranhofer's cross-references, and a sealed five-hour braise that is the more interesting of the pair. A few things need translating before either works in a modern kitchen.

The cross-referencesNo. 1253 is the shad fillet preparation Ranhofer directs you to, and No. 728 is his sorrel puree. Without those two entries the first half of this recipe is not self-contained; cook the fillets by any gentle method and make a plain buttered sorrel puree and you have the dish.
Why five hoursThe long enclosed cook in an acidic sorrel bed is traditionally said to soften shad's many fine intermuscular bones. Ranhofer gives no reason for the duration, but shortening it substantially will leave the bones as they were.
Oven heatRanhofer gives no temperatures; "moderate oven" is conventionally read as somewhere near 350F. For a sealed pot held five hours, 275F to 300F is the sensible reading — the fish needs to hold below a simmer, not braise hard.
Sealing the potThe "little dough made with flour and water" is luting paste: a stiff, unsalted flour-and-water rope pressed around the lid rim, which bakes hard and traps every bit of steam. Roughly two parts flour to one part water by weight. A tight-lidded Dutch oven with a sheet of foil under the lid does the same job.
WeightsTwo ounces of chopped onion is one small onion; two ounces of butter is four tablespoons. Half a pound of sorrel leaves looks enormous raw and collapses to under a cup — buy the full amount and do not substitute spinach, which has none of the acidity the method depends on.
Pan materialSorrel is aggressively acidic. Use enameled cast iron, stainless or a glazed earthenware pot; bare cast iron or aluminum will pick up a metallic taste and turn the sorrel grey.
Sourcing shadAmerican shad runs are much reduced and several states have closed or tightly restricted the fishery, so shad is seasonal and regional rather than a staple. Buy from a fishmonger who can say where it came from. If none is available, the sorrel braise suits any oily, bony river fish.
Serving and yieldA whole shad of three to four pounds feeds four to six. Ranhofer says to serve the fish whole with the broth reduced — lift the fish out carefully, since after five hours it will barely hold together, boil the sorrel liquor down to a loose sauce, and spoon it over.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down that repertoire whole. Shad gets an unusually long run of entries in it because the spring shad runs on the Hudson and the Delaware were a genuine event in the nineteenth-century American calendar, and because the fish's notorious boniness gave a French-trained chef something to solve. Alose a l'oseille — shad with sorrel — is a standard of French river cookery, and the long sealed cook here reflects the old and widely repeated belief that sorrel's acidity dissolves the fine bones; whether it truly dissolves them or merely cooks them to softness, the pairing of an oily fish with a sharply sour green is sound on taste alone. Sorrel was a common kitchen-garden plant in Ranhofer's day and has largely dropped out of American markets since, which is the main reason a recipe like this now reads as exotic.