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Baked Shad, Sauce Soubise
Finely chop one white onion and place it in a saucepan with half pint cold milk. Season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a teaspoon grated nutmeg and gently boil for fifteen minutes. Heat in a small saucepan one tablespoon melted butter, add one tablespoon flour; stir well, pour the milk into this pan and briskly stir until it comes to a boil. Dilute an egg yolk in two tablespoons cold milk, add it to the same, stir for one minute and remove to the corner of the range, but do not allow it to boil again.
After procuring, remove the principal bones from half a fresh six-pound shad; wipe nicely and place in a lightly buttered pan. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika; spread half tablespoon melted butter over the surface of the fish, cover with a sheet of lightly buttered paper and set in a brisk oven to bake for thirty minutes. Remove from the oven, lift up the paper, then pour the Soubise sauce over the shad, dredge a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over it, reset in the oven and bake for ten minutes longer, or until a nice golden colour. Remove from the oven, carefully lift up the fish with two skimmers, dress on a hot dish decorated all around with very thin slices of lemon and serve.
A straightforward baked fish with an onion cream sauce, written in the measuring vocabulary of a professional American kitchen around 1900. Two things need attention: the sauce must not boil once the yolk goes in, and the fish will be done well before thirty minutes.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is a half teaspoon in a half pint of milk. That is aggressive by modern taste; a quarter teaspoon is plenty, and the teaspoon of grated nutmeg should be cut to a quarter teaspoon or the sauce tastes of custard spice.
- Brisk oven'brisk' in books of this period generally means a hot oven, roughly 400-450F; 425F works here. Preheat fully before the fish goes in.
- The yolk is the hingeOnce the diluted yolk is stirred in, the sauce must stay below a simmer or it will scramble and break. "Remove to the corner of the range" means the coolest part of the stovetop; off the heat entirely, with a lid, is the modern equivalent.
- Cooking timeHalf a six-pound shad yields considerably less than three pounds of flesh once the head and frame are gone. At 425F it will be opaque and flaking in 15 to 20 minutes, not thirty; add the sauce and cheese then and give it 8 to 10 minutes more to colour. Shad is oily but still dries out.
- Boning a shadShad has an intricate lattice of floating bones, and removing them cleanly is specialist work done in a practised sequence of cuts. Buy it boned from a fishmonger during the spring run rather than attempting it; 'remove the principal bones' glosses over a genuinely skilled job.
- Buttered paperUse buttered parchment, not waxed paper, and cut it to sit directly on the fish. It is there to keep the surface from drying before the sauce goes on.
- AvailabilityAmerican shad runs are much smaller than they were a century ago, and the fishery is regulated or closed in some waters. Wild-caught shad appears in East Coast markets in spring; a thick fillet of bluefish or mackerel behaves similarly under this sauce.
- YieldServes four as a main course. The sauce quantity is generous for one half-fish and reheats gently if you have any left.
Sauce soubise — onion cooked soft in milk or cream and bound with a white roux — is traditionally credited to the kitchen of Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an 18th-century French marshal whose household cooks lent their employer's name to the dish, as was the custom. By the time it reached American hotel kitchens it had become a workhorse coating sauce for fish and veal, and the finishing touch here of yolk, Parmesan and a return to the oven is the classic gratin treatment. Shad was the American half of the equation: large spring runs up the Hudson, Delaware and Connecticut rivers made it a cheap and abundant fish on the Eastern seaboard, and in earlier generations it carried a reputation as poor men's food before city restaurants took it up as a seasonal delicacy. Dressing a river fish in a French court sauce is exactly what a book called The International Cook Book was for.