Baked Shad
Clean, wash and wipe the fish, which should be a large one. Make a stuffing of grated bread crumbs steeped in sweet milk, butter, salt, pepper and sweet herbs, moistened with a beaten egg. Stuff the shad and sew it up. Lay it in the baking pan, with a cupful of water to keep it from burning and bake an hour, basting with butter and water until it is tender throughout and well browned. Take it up, put in a hot dish and cover tightly, while you boil up the gravy, with a tablespoonful of catsup, a tablespoonful of browned flour, which has been wet with cold water, the juice of a lemon, and, if you like, a glass of sherry or Madeira. Garnish with sliced lemon, and water cresses. You may pour the gravy around the fish or serve in a sauce boat.
A straightforward stuffed baked fish from the era before oven dials, with a pan gravy thickened by browned flour. The main adjustment is time: an hour at any useful temperature will overcook a shad that has been filleted or is under about four pounds.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; period ranges rarely carried a reliable gauge and cooks judged heat by hand and experience. A modern equivalent is 350F; a whole stuffed fish benefits from steady moderate heat rather than a fierce one.
- TimingAn hour suits a whole 4-6 lb shad, head on, fully stuffed. Judge by the thickest part rather than the clock. Cooks aiming for a moist result often pull fish at 130-135F at the backbone and let it climb under cover, but because this fish is stuffed with an egg-bound bread mixture, take the fish to 145F and check that the stuffing itself has reached 165F. A boned fillet needs 20-25 minutes at most.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk. The adjective distinguished it from soured or buttermilk, both of which were kitchen staples and would have changed the stuffing entirely.
- Sweet herbsThe standard bundle of the period: parsley, thyme, marjoram, summer savory, sometimes a little sage. A tablespoon or two of chopped fresh herbs total is enough for a fish this size.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a skillet until the color of hazelnut shells, then slaked with cold water to a paste before it goes into the boiling liquid. It thickens less than raw flour but carries a roasted flavor; use about half again as much as you would of untoasted flour.
- CatsupAt this period the word could mean tomato, mushroom or walnut catsup, all thinner and sharper than the modern bottled kind. Mushroom catsup gets closest to the intended savory note; tomato ketchup will read distinctly sweeter.
- A glass of sherryRoughly a wineglassful, about 2 fl oz or 1/4 cup by the period measure. Add it with the other gravy ingredients so it has a minute or two to boil down.
- Sewing it upKitchen twine and a trussing needle, or simply close the cavity with short metal skewers laced with twine. Remove all of it before the fish goes to table.
- The bonesShad is notoriously bony, and an hour in the oven does nothing to soften the fine intramuscular bones. Either buy the fish professionally boned or warn the table and serve carefully.
- YieldA large whole shad with stuffing serves six to eight.
Shad, an anadromous member of the herring family, ran up the Atlantic rivers each spring in numbers that made it one of the cheapest fish on the eastern seaboard through the nineteenth century. The spring run supported shad planking suppers along the Chesapeake and the Delaware and made "shad and roe" a seasonal marker in city markets. Some recipes of this period recommend baking shad for five or six hours in the belief that the long heat dissolves its fine bones, though the practice was far from standard; this version keeps sensibly to an hour and lets the stuffing and the sherry-and-catsup gravy carry the dish. Stocks collapsed through the twentieth century from dams, pollution and overfishing, and shad is now a regional specialty rather than a poor man's fish.