Baked Shad
1 shad weighing 4 lbs. ¼ lb. mushrooms ½ cupful Crisco 2 tablespoonfuls chopped parsley 2 tablespoonfuls chopped chives 1 cupful breadcrumbs 1 egg Salt and white pepper Salt pork 1 cupful cream 1 teaspoonful cornstarch Clean, wipe and dry the shad. Melt Crisco, add breadcrumbs, chopped mushrooms, parsley, chives, egg well beaten, salt and pepper. Stuff fish with this forcemeat, then lay it in a greased pan, put thin strips of salt pork over it and bake in hot oven for forty minutes. Lay the fish on a hot platter. Pour cream into baking pan, add cornstarch and stir till boiling. Serve with the fish.
A stuffed whole shad, barded with salt pork and finished with a quick cream sauce made in the roasting pan. Two of the quantities as printed are corrupted by the original typesetting, so read them with care.
- On the mushroomsThe printed page gives ¼ lb. mushrooms, as our text now reads. That is about 4 oz, which suits the cupful of breadcrumbs in the forcemeat.
- The Crisco quantity is doubtful1½ cupfuls of shortening to 1 cupful of breadcrumbs would give a stuffing that is mostly fat. Half a cupful of melted shortening or butter binds the crumbs properly; the larger figure is likely a compositor's error, and the book has an interest in generous amounts of its own product.
- Hot ovenSomewhere in the region of 400 to 450F; the book gives no number. A 4 lb whole fish will likely be done before forty minutes at that heat — check at 25 to 30 minutes, when the flesh at the backbone reaches 145F and pulls cleanly from the bone.
- Salt porkThin strips laid over the fish are barding, not seasoning: they baste the lean flesh as they render. Unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta does the same job. Blanch salt pork for a minute if it is heavily cured, or the sauce will be too salty.
- The pan sauceSlake the teaspoonful of cornstarch in a spoonful of the cold cream before it goes into the hot pan, or it will lump. Scrape up the browned juices, bring it just to a boil, and strain if the stuffing has shed crumbs.
- White pepperSpecified rather than black largely for appearance: a cream sauce and a pale stuffing were expected to be free of dark specks. Black pepper will show, and tastes somewhat different, but will not harm the dish.
- Shad bonesShad carries several rows of fine floating intermuscular bones per side that no amount of cooking dissolves. Buy it filleted and boned if you can, or warn the table; boning shad was a specialist skill.
- Sourcing and yieldWild Atlantic shad stocks are much reduced and several states have closed or restricted the fishery; buy from a managed source, or substitute a whole bass or bluefish of similar size. A 4 lb fish with stuffing serves six.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: a hydrogenated vegetable shortening that behaved like lard, kept without refrigeration, and had no animal origin — a point the book presses for both kosher and hot-weather households. Baked shad belongs to an older tradition the book is borrowing prestige from. Shad ran up the Atlantic rivers in enormous spring numbers through the nineteenth century, cheap enough to be a working food in Philadelphia and along the Delaware and the Hudson, and shad planked, baked or stuffed was a fixture of American spring cookery and of political shad bakes. Its long decline through the twentieth century, from dams, pollution and overfishing, is why a fish once sold by the wagonload is now a specialty item. The forcemeat of crumbs, mushrooms and fine herbs here is straightforwardly French in method, the kind of dish a 1913 book put forward to show that its new fat could hold its own in company cooking.}</invoke>