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Shad, Puree of Sorrel
Prepare and keep hot a puree of sorrel. Procure a fresh three-pound shad or one of half that weight, scale, wash and thoroughly wipe. With a sharp knife make a few incisions on both sides, place on a dish, rub all over with a good tablespoon oil, season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, then lay the fish on a tin. Squeeze over the juice of half a sound lemon and set pan in oven for fifty minutes, basting once in a while. Remove, spread sorrel on a hot dish, lay shad on top, pour tablespoon melted butter over and serve.
A plain baked shad with a hot sorrel puree beneath it — the pairing is the point, and the acid in the sorrel is doing real work against the fish's oil. Two things need attention: the missing oven temperature and the missing puree recipe.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 375F; the fifty-minute time suggests a moderate oven, though the book does not say so.
- TimingFifty minutes is far too long for a 3 lb shad by current practice, and much too long for the 1.5 lb alternative. Figure roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the shoulder and pull the fish at 135-140F at the backbone; the flesh should just separate from the bone.
- The sorrel pureeFilippini assumes you have it from elsewhere in the book. Sweat a large quantity of stemmed sorrel leaves in butter over low heat — it collapses to a fraction of its volume in two or three minutes — then puree, season, and enrich with butter or a spoonful of cream. It will turn a drab olive green; that is normal and unavoidable.
- "A tin"A shallow metal baking pan or sheet, not a covered dish. Line it, since shad skin sticks and the fish has to be moved whole to the serving platter.
- Shad bonesShad is famously bone-ridden, with an intricate set of fine floating intramuscular bones that ordinary baking will not dissolve. Buy it boned by a fishmonger if you can, or serve it with the warning that Filippini did not bother to give.
- SourcingAmerican shad runs are much reduced and several Atlantic fisheries are closed or restricted; buy from a managed run in spring or substitute mackerel, bluefish or a small salmon, all of which take the sorrel equally well.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for a 3 lb fish is about right; halve it for the smaller fish, and go easy if the sorrel puree is already sharply seasoned.
- YieldA 3 lb whole shad serves four as a main course; the smaller fish serves two.
Shad with sorrel is a French dish before it is an American one — alose à l'oseille, built on the spring runs of the European shad in the Loire and the Gironde, where the sour leaf was set against a very oily fish. It is often said that the long cooking of shad on a bed of sorrel dissolves the fine bones; the acid does soften them somewhat but does not eliminate them, and the pairing survives on flavor rather than on that claim. When Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's, put it in The International Cook Book (1906), American shad was still a cheap seasonal glut running up the Hudson, the Delaware and the Chesapeake each spring — the fish whose Latin name, Alosa sapidissima, means "most savory." Both halves of the dish have since become luxuries: shad through decades of dam-building and overfishing, sorrel because it is hard to come by.