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Planked Shad, Colbert
Scale and neatly trim half a fresh three-pound shad. Season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, and rub all over with a tablespoon oil. Oil the top of an oak shad plank, lay on the shad, skin side downward and place in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove, prepare a brioche potato preparation, drop into a pastry bag with a fancy tube at the bottom, then with it make a nice border all around the edge of the plank. Reset in the oven for fifteen minutes more, remove, pour a Colbert sauce over the fish and serve.
A planked fish is a hot-oven dish, and this one leaves out both the temperature and any mention of shad's notorious bones. Two details carry it: a properly prepared plank and potatoes stiff enough to hold a piped border.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Planked fish was generally cooked in a hot oven, and something in the 425-450F range is a reasonable modern reading rather than anything the book states. Thirty minutes is ample for a half-shad of this size; check for opaque flesh at the thickest point rather than trusting the clock. Note that the recipe does not say the fish has been boned.
- Half a three-pound shadThat is one fillet side, skin on, serving two generously. Whole shad now often run 3-5 lb, so a single side of a larger fish will need the same treatment with a few minutes more.
- The bonesShad has intricate rows of floating intramuscular bones that no amount of cooking dissolves. Filleting shad is a specialist job; buy it already boned from a fishmonger, or accept that the diner will be picking. The bones are one reason shad fell out of fashion; the decline of the runs is another.
- The plankAn untreated hardwood plank; the recipe specifies oak, larger than the fish and oiled on top. It says nothing about thickness or preheating. Never use pressure-treated or glued lumber, and skip commercial "grilling planks" meant to be soaked and smoked -- those are for a covered grill, not a dry oven.
- Brioche potato preparationAlmost certainly the duchesse mixture, which is what "brioche" potatoes are formed from: dry riced potato beaten with egg yolk and butter, seasoned, stiff enough to pipe and hold its shape. It must be firm or the border will slump into the fish juices during the second baking. A large star tube gives the "fancy" ridged edge that browns well.
- Colbert sauceClassically a compound butter served as a sauce: softened butter worked with meat glaze, lemon juice, chopped tarragon and parsley, sometimes a spoon of madeira, warmed only enough to loosen. Do not let it boil or it will separate. The recipe has it poured over after the fish comes out of the oven, not before the last bake.
- SourcingAmerican shad runs are much reduced and in-river fishing is closed or restricted in several Atlantic states. What reaches market is seasonal, late winter into spring, and often sold as boned fillets with the roe separately.
Planking fish on a board set before or under direct heat is one of the oldest North American cooking methods, generally traced to Indigenous practice along the Atlantic rivers and taken up by colonial and later Chesapeake cooks; the Virginia "shad planking" survives as a political spring ritual. Shad is an anadromous herring that runs up the rivers in enormous numbers each spring, and for much of the nineteenth century it was cheap, abundant and unavoidable -- "poor man's salmon," prized for its rich flesh and its roe, cursed for its bones. What is telling here is the treatment: the plank is a rustic river-bank technique, but the piped duchesse border and the Colbert butter are pure restaurant French, the vocabulary of Delmonico's kitchen, where Alexander Filippini spent his career. The recipe shows an American ingredient being dressed for a New York dining room.