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Plain Broiled Shad
A simple, but very delicious way to broil shad: Split the fish, lay it in a well greased wire broiler, and broil under the gas flame, flat side first, until brown; then turn and broil skin side until crisp enough to peel off. Remove as much of the skin as will peel easily and broil a few minutes longer. Then invert on a hot platter, and cover with Maitre d'hotel sauce; one tablespoonful butter, creamed with one tablespoonful fine minced parsley; one level teaspoonful salt, one saltspoonful of white pepper, one teaspoonful lemon juice and one teaspoonful mushroom or walnut catsup. When broiled in this quick way it should not be salted before cooking, as that tends to draw out the juice and make it dry and hard. It has sufficient oil of its own for basting.
A gas-broiler recipe from the era when the broiler was a flame you slid the fish under, not a drawer beneath the oven. The method still works; the main adjustments are equipment and the shad itself.
- The hinge: no salt before broilingThe original is right, and it is the one instruction worth obeying. Salting a split shad before high heat pulls moisture to the surface and the thin flesh dries. Salt goes into the butter that dresses it instead.
- Split shad means butterflied, not filletedThe fish is opened flat along the backbone and left in one piece, skin outward. A fishmonger will do this; shad is notoriously bony and a whole-fish bone job is a specialist's task. Boned shad fillets are sold in season and will broil in noticeably less time, so go by the original's cues -- browned on the flesh side, crisp on the skin -- rather than the clock.
- "Broil under the gas flame"Preheat a modern broiler on high with the rack about 4 inches from the element. A well-greased hinged wire broiler basket lets you flip the fish without tearing it; a heavy oiled sheet pan and a wide spatula will also serve.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So: 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon minced parsley, 1 level teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon white pepper, 1 teaspoon lemon juice.
- Mushroom or walnut catsupNeither is tomato ketchup. Both are thin, dark, salty steeping liquors of the old English kitchen; mushroom catsup is still made commercially and walnut catsup is a specialty item. Worcestershire sauce or a good mushroom soy stands in for the savoury note, used in the same teaspoon quantity.
- Peeling the skinBroiling the skin side until it crisps and lifts is deliberate: shad skin is tough and strongly flavoured. Peel what comes away easily and stop there, then give it the last few minutes of heat to colour the exposed flesh.
- Maitre d'hotel is a compound butterCream everything into softened butter and set it on the hot fish so it melts over the surface. It is not cooked. The stated quantity dresses one fish lightly; double it if you like a pool of sauce on the platter.
- Yield and seasonA whole shad runs 3-5 lb and feeds four. American shad is a spring fish and stocks in many rivers are much reduced from 1900 levels; buy from a managed fishery, or substitute bluefish or mackerel, which take the same treatment.
Shad was one of the great cheap fish of the American Atlantic coast, running up the Delaware, Hudson, Susquehanna and Connecticut rivers each spring in numbers that supported whole shore-town economies, and spring shad planking and shad-roe breakfasts were fixtures of the season. That abundance is why a household book of the period treats it as an everyday broil rather than a delicacy, and why the recipe spends its care on technique instead of expense: the fish is oily enough to baste itself, and the only extravagance is the spoonful of walnut or mushroom catsup in the butter, an English inheritance from the days before tomato ketchup captured the word. Maitre d'hotel butter, parsley and lemon worked into butter, arrived in American cookbooks with the general nineteenth-century adoption of French restaurant terms.