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Broiled Shad, Vert-Pre
Procure half a very fresh shad of three pounds. Scale, trim and thoroughly wipe. Make four small incisions on the skin side, rub the fish all around with a tablespoon salt and half teaspoon paprika. Arrange on the broiler and broil on a brisk fire for six minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a large, hot dish, spread a green butter over decorate with six quarters lemon and a little parsley greens and serve.
A plain grill from a Delmonico's-trained chef, with the whole dish resting on the herb butter and on not overcooking the fish. Two details need translating: what "half a shad" is, and what "green butter" means.
- Green butterThis is beurre vert-pré, essentially maitre d'hotel butter gone green: softened butter creamed with finely chopped parsley (often with chervil, tarragon and chives), lemon juice, salt and pepper. Some kitchens blanched the herbs briefly and squeezed them dry for a stronger colour. Make it ahead, keep it cold, and let it melt over the hot fish at the table.
- Half a shadA three-pound shad split lengthwise gives one bone-in side of roughly a pound and a half, skin on. That is two servings, three at a stretch. A fishmonger will do the splitting and can also remove the worst of the intramuscular bones, though shad is notoriously bony and only expert hand-boning, which is a specialist skill, yields a genuinely boneless side.
- The salt is far too muchA tablespoon of salt on a pound and a half of fish is a cure, not a seasoning. Use about a teaspoon of fine salt, or two of kosher, and the half teaspoon of paprika as written.
- Brisk fireA hot charcoal grill or a broiler preheated to its highest setting, with the fish about four inches from the element. Shad is oily and will flare on live coals; keep a cooler zone to move it to.
- TimingSix minutes a side suited a thick bone-in half over uneven coals. Under a modern broiler, cook skin side up almost entirely on one side, about six to eight minutes total for a pound-and-a-half piece, and stop when the flesh flakes at the thickest point. Overcooked shad turns dry and its bones become more obtrusive, not less.
- The skin incisionsThe four cuts stop the skin contracting and curling the fish off the grate. Cut through the skin only, not into the flesh.
- SourcingAmerican shad runs have collapsed in many rivers and commercial harvest is closed or restricted in a number of Atlantic states; supply is seasonal and regional. Mackerel, bluefish or a small salmon side takes the same treatment where shad is unavailable.
- ServingLemon quarters and parsley are the whole garnish here, but a classic vert-pré plate would add watercress and straw potatoes, which is worth doing if you want a full course.
Vert-pré is French kitchen shorthand for "green meadow" and covers a family of grill garnishes built on green herb butter, usually with watercress and matchstick potatoes alongside; it was standard nineteenth-century restaurant French, applied indifferently to steak, chicken and fish. Attaching it to shad is the book's characteristic move: an American river fish given a Continental dress. Shad, often called the largest of the herrings, ran up the Atlantic rivers in vast numbers each spring, and its arrival in the Hudson and Delaware was a seasonal event in New York markets, cheap enough to be common food and prized enough to appear on hotel menus, usually planked, broiled or served with its roe. The bones were the perennial complaint, and much of the older literature on shad concerns ways to defeat them, from long slow baking to elaborate boning by hand. That the recipe specifies "very fresh" is not idle: oily fish of this kind go rancid quickly, and in a period when refrigeration was still uneven freshness was the one thing a cook could not fake.