by John McPhee
Make a stuffing of fresh sausage (made with pork that is not too lean, and with Morton’s Sausage Seasoning), cooked apples (peeled and cut into quarters), and fresh soft breadcrumbs. Lay a boned fillet on an oblong platter (buttered), dust with flour, and cover with stuffing. Cover with the other boned fillet. Pipe rosettes of potatoes duchesse around the shad and bake for 45–60 minutes at 350–400. Duchesse potatoes are made like mashed except they are dryer and are stiffened with a couple of eggs and flour. You’ll want a good strong sauce made with a fumet of shad perfumed with celery, onion, carrot, bay leaves, and peppercorns, and moistened with cider, not water. Strain this. Thicken with beurre manié (butter whipped into a little flour). Adjust taste, add some diced cooked apples, and you should be able to serve 5 or 6 very decently. It’s the kind of dish A. J. Liebling might have eaten in Normandy.
In “Philadelphia on the River,” a 1986 publication of the Philadelphia Maritime Museum, Philip Chadwick Foster Smith presents a baked-shad recipe in which roe is mixed into a stuffing:
BAKED SHAD WITH ROE
2 pounds shad
1 pair roe
1 tbs. chopped parsley
Pepper, salt (if desired)
1 tbs. butter
Soft bread crumbs
Clarified butter
½ cup sauterne
1½ cups chopped mushrooms
1 tsp. paprika
Split and bone the shad. Scald the roe, split them, and scrape out the eggs, to which add the parsley, desired seasoning, butter, and a few soft bread crumbs. Stuff the shad with this mixture and secure with string. Place in baking dish and brush on clarified butter. Cook in slow (300 F) oven for 35 to 40 minutes, taking care to baste frequently with the cooking juices. Saute the mushrooms in some of these juices, add wine, heat, and pour over the shad. Garnish with lemon wedges dipped in paprika.
When I asked James Webb—in Upper Economy, Nova Scotia, on the Bay of Fundy—if his family likes to eat the shad he traps in his brush weir, he said, “There’s a lot of shad ate around here. They’re very bony but boy they’re some sweet fish.” The Webbs fry, bake, and barbecue shad. He said they bake whole shad thirty minutes at three hundred with a stuffing of potato, onion, and summer savory. “Eat them with pepper, salt, and vinegar. Fried: cut them in one-inch steaks, but first wipe the fish dry. There should be no fresh water on fish. It takes the taste away. Roll the steaks in cornmeal or flour. Fry them in some oil—not too much. Barbecue: wrap them in tinfoil with thin-sliced onion on it. Jab holes in the tinfoil to let the fat run out. Cook for roughly twenty minutes on a grate over hot coals.”
Following a recipe in A. J. McClane’s “The Encyclopedia of Fish Cookery,” I once steamed a buck shad—the whole fish minus scales, head, fins, and tail—for five hours on the elevated rack of a fish poacher. Although I am not much tempted to do it again, the method worked. The flesh remained firm and flavorsome, although scarcely with the taste of a fresh broiled shad. The backbone was slightly crunchy but edible. The small intermuscular bones melted in the mouth. The recipe described a caper sauce. It was too rich. Try another sauce.
The purpose of long cooking is to defeat the bones without ripping up the fish to get them out. Defeat equals dissolve. The large bones soften to the point of edibility, and the myriad small bones simply disappear. Marilyn Yates, whom I’ve known since high school, bakes whole shad at two hundred and fifty degrees for seven hours, as her mother did. Marilyn has never cooked shad another way. She begins with a spotlessly cleaned fish—unsplit, and without scales, head, or fins. She continues: “Season it with salt and pepper, lay three or four strips of bacon on it, place it in one cup of water, and surround it with sliced onion and sliced lemon. Cover it tightly with foil or the top of the pan. Check every two and a half hours to see if the water level is o.k. If not, add a little more. Good eating!”
Tom Horton, in “Bay Country,” mentions a long-bake method for Alose, the French first cousin of American shad. The result is called Alose sans os. As noted in Chapter 3, members of the shadminded Pamunkey tribe, with their shad hatchery on the Pamunkey River in tidewater Virginia, tightly wrap whole shad in two sheets of aluminum foil and give it six hours at two hundred and fifty. Described as “baked,” the shad is baked in the same sense that a restaurant potato in foil is “baked.” It is steamed in its own fluids. I have known people whose strategy in the bone war is to leave shad in a refrigerator for two days, and then—like Willy Bemis preparing fish skeletons—scrape the flesh from the bones with a spoon. They make shadcakes. Sooner or later, almost anybody will, at least once, try the bone war’s ultimate weapon. You can nuke a shad with a pressure cooker. I did it for the first time a decade ago, and plan to do it a second time some year soon. I put inch-thick slices in the pressure cooker with onions and celery, and timed the hiss (at fifteen pounds) for one half hour. After the fish cooled, I peeled off the skin, removed the backbone, and refrigerated the rest. It was served cold under a mayonnaise thinned with lemon juice and thickened with chopped fresh dill. The intermuscular bones and even the ribs had disappeared.
As an alternative to the dill mayonnaise, Alan Lieb suggested gooseberries cooked the same way you cook rhubarb—in a small amount of water with sugar. “In June, when gooseberries are available, you could make a puree and freeze it,” he said. “It’s a wonderful counterpoint to the richness of the fish.” Also he mentioned a green-peppercorn sauce—“crushed peppercorns in a meat glaze, with a little vinegar in it to bring it all to life.”
Armand Charest, the master dartmaker of the Connecticut River, has an alternative to the gooseberries and the green peppercorns. Armand Charest: “You take a shad. You put it in a pressure cooker with a brick. You cook it for eight hours. Then you throw away the shad and eat the brick.”
Baking any fish on an oak plank is said to improve your chances of enjoying its natural flavors, and the custom of propping up the plank before a bed of hot coals is, as noted in Chapter 8, the memorial fate of the American shad. Dr. Samuel L. Howell, in 1837, wrote of “nailing the fish to a clean oaken plank, previously heated, and setting it before a brisk fire. By this method the juices of the fish are all preserved.”
In 1849, “Frank Forester’s Fish and Fishing of the United States and British Provinces of North America” included a “Sea-Shore Receipt for Roasted Shad”:
Split your fish down the back after he is cleaned and washed, nail the halves on shingles or short board; stick them erect in the sand round a large fire; as soon as they are well browned, serve on whatever you have got; eat with cold butter, black pepper, salt, and a good appetite. This is a delicious way of cooking this fine fish.
In 1855, Hannah Bouvier Peterson gave a detailed description of planking in “The National Cook Book.” Find an oak board three inches thick and two feet square, she wrote. Stand it before a fire “until it gets good and hot.” Nail to the board a salted, split shad. Stand it before the fire head down. When juices begin to run, invert it. Do that frequently. When done, butter it, serve it on the board.
Mrs. Scott’s “Cooking Shad by the Open Fire” (1912) reviewed shad cooking in colonial America, culminating in planked shad. Colonists generally cooked shad on the gridiron—a rectangular iron frame with bars set maybe three-quarters of an inch apart. Hickory coals were “raked out on the hearth.” The gridiron, standing on legs, was placed over them. Shad were also cooked in long-handled frying pans. Elevated on hickory sticks, they were cooked in covered baking pans set in glowing coals. They were also cooked in rectangular boxes known as roasting kitchens. And they were planked:
A slab of hickory or oak was used. This was split, cut and hewed down to two or three inches thick, a little wider than the opened fish, and about two feet long. This was propped up before a bed of coals till it was sizzling hot. The fish was split down the back, wiped dry and then fastened skin side down to the hot plank. The plank was then propped up at an angle of about 60 degrees before the fire. The shad was constantly basted with a
piece of fat pork on a switch held above it. The ends of the plank were reversed from time to time, so that the shad would be uniformly done. When the flesh was flaky when pierced with a fork, it was done. The shad was then served on the hot plank and was said to be a dish of rare gastronomic excellence.
Charles Hardy III, historian of Delaware shad, describes an “advertising war” among hotels on both sides of the river which “brought planked shad to national prominence” at the time of the national centennial, in 1876. “The craze for fresh planked shad continued to spread in the eighteen-eighties.” People came “from as far away as Pittsburgh to eat planked shad.”
According to an endnote by William Woys Weaver, “most American cookbooks before 1850 do not even mention shad roe, and there are still quite a number of people today who consider roe-eating a repulsive refinement.” Weaver’s article, “When Shad Came In: Shad Cooking in Old Philadelphia,” was published in 1982 in the thrice-annual Petits Propos Culinaires. In eighteenth-century America, he says, shad roe was “thrown away, fed to pigs, or given to the poor.” At the turn of the twenty-first century, you could order Shad Roe with Bacon and Lemon Chive Butter from the luncheon menu in the Four Seasons on Park Avenue in New York for thirty-six dollars à la carte.
A “Joy of Cooking” recipe for broiled shad roe calls for “1 cup canned shad roe,” but don’t go away. “The Joy of Cooking” knows from roe. Or knew from roe. The edition in which I found that recipe appeared in 1972. In all, it had eight shad-roe recipes. Seven mentioned fresh roe. The recipes for fresh whole roe sacs were two-stage procedures: first you parboiled them, then you broiled, baked, sautéed, or creamed them. “Use only white pepper,” the “Joy” recommended. It also said, “Hard roe, to be cooked and served alone, should be pricked with a needle to prevent the membrane from bursting and splattering the little eggs”—a precaution I have not found to be a hundred per cent effective.
Canned shad roe, in the twenty-first century, is a small industry concentrated almost exclusively on Columbia River shad. Nelson Crab, in Tokeland, Washington, cans shad roe, smoked shad, and smoked shad pate. Bell Buoy, in Seaside, Oregon, folds broken roe sacs into small cylindrical cans. Steve Fick’s Fishhawk Fisheries, in Astoria, Oregon, fills an elegant oval tin with integral sacs.
We have two other editions of “The Joy of Cooking,” and they suggest a dimming of shad roe in the American consciousness and a trend ominous to Cannery Row. By 1975, “Joy” was down to five shad-roe recipes, three of which specified canned roe. A fourth was AC-DC—your choice, fresh or vacuum-packed. The “Madrilene Ring with Shad Roe Cockaigne” was built on “chilled canned shad roe,” as was “Creamed Shad Roe,” whose fundaments included curry powder, paprika, melted butter, and three-quarters of a cup of heavy cream. I have been there and may not be returning soon, in hopes of seeing a little more of my grandchildren. You will look in vain for any such recipe in “The All New All Purpose Joy of Cooking” (1997). At eleven hundred and thirty-six pages, it is twenty-five per cent larger and even more encyclopedic than its predecessors, yet it contains only one brief and simple recipe for shad roe, tersely telling you to saute it fresh.
Steven Raichlen, in his 1988 cookbook, “A Celebration of the Seasons,” pays passing homage to corporeal shad (“an epicure’s morsel: rich as herring, buttery as swordfish, delicate as pike”) on his way to saying
For many people, the fish is of small consequence—the mere packaging for another springtime delicacy, shad roe. Raw shad roe is not for the squeamish: two soft, squishy banana-shaped egg sacs, containing 300,000 eggs, connected by a veined, often bloody membrane. But cooked it’s the sort of fare one should savor, kneeling with one’s head bared. The taste of shad roe is ineffable, but to get an idea, imagine the richness of sweetbreads, the subtle liver flavor of foie gras and the sensuous crunch of the finest caviar. If I’ve failed to convince you, please pass your plate to me!
“They are sometimes treated like hams,” Dr. Howell wrote in 1837, “viz. by rubbing them with fine salt, salt-petre, and molasses, and smoked for a few days, and in this way are very superior to those cured with salt alone.” In Columbia County, New York, in the twenty-first century, people smoke shad over apple wood, put signs in their yards, and sell it. The New York Times has described smoked shad as a “real working-class delicacy.” The fillets are soaked in brine with black pepper, lemon juice, molasses, and brown sugar, and smoked for as little as two and as much as twelve hours over low heat. Oak, ash, or maple will do if you don’t have an orchard. Patroons can seek admission to the working class.
If you ask Boyd Kynard what he does with his shad, he says, “Smoke ’em—smoking is the best thing to do with any bony fish.” As in kippered herring. A shad, after all, is a herring. Boyd cuts his shad into one-inch steaks, soaks them in brine and sugar, then hotsmokes them. “The flesh dries. You can see the bones.” He may be the Bernini of the shad smoker. He says to make your shad smoker a foot and a half square and two feet high. A pine frame is o.k., covered with quarter-inch hardware cloth. The smoker should have a door at ground level, and inside you want three racks, four to five inches apart, all in the upper half. They, too, can be made of pine. On a hot plate on the floor is a small cast-iron skillet with wood chips in it and a lid or a piece of sheet metal that restricts oxygen so the wood won’t flare up. The lid’s diameter should be slightly smaller than the pan’s. In the door, for the intake of air, make three one-inch holes at the level of the hot plate. To vent the smoker, make four one-inch holes at the top of the back. A candy thermometer can rest in one of those upper holes, monitoring temperature from the start.
Philip Reed, of Friendship, Maine, “smokes shad elegantly,” says his friend Sam Chapman (the aquaculturist of Chapter 5). Reed shuffles his feet. He is in his eighties and modest, a retired herring fisherman. “It isn’t how much brine you use, it’s how long you soak the fish,” he says. And that is all he says. His shad are split down the back, and left intact at the belly. He leaves the scales on. Sam Chapman, who has never had shad another way, says, “Nothing makes beer taste better than smoked shad.”
At the beginning of June, some years ago, I stopped in at Alan Lieb’s house in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, and had a delicious lunch of fresh saltless bread and pickled shad. It had been pickled in apple-cider vinegar with brown sugar in a quart jar. “You use about a cup of sugar and a cup and a half of cider vinegar,” he said. “Two teaspoons of allspice, two teaspoons of ground cloves, and a little water to soften the vinegar.” He filled a Mason jar with those ingredients, and gave it to me so that I could practice boning shad and then pickle my mistakes.
This was sort of an echo of eighteenth-century Philadelphia’s teatime pickled shad (Chapter 8). In 1857, Elizabeth Nicholson echoed it, too, in “The Economical Cook and House-Book” (Willis P. Hazard, Philadelphia). She said to use salt, pepper, allspice, cloves, and mace. Put seasoned pieces of shad in an earthen or stone vessel and fill it with vinegar. “Then tightly close the jar with dough, put it in the oven of a baker after the bread has come out.” Let it stand ten hours.
Skip Trimble, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, makes shad quenelles with sorrel pesto and cheese. “It’s fish dumplings in a cheese sauce,” he told a reporter. “It’s pastry, like cream puffs, that’s mixed with ground fish, and when you cook it, it blows up like a balloon, the size of a fist.”
For dinner one evening after fishing, Alan Lieb fed me and George Hackl shad with whisky sauce. We had actually caught the fish the previous day, and he had corned the fillets. They had stood for twenty-four hours in a gallon of water in which three-quarters of a cup of sugar and three-quarters of a cup of salt had been dissolved. He grilled them over a smoky fire on a grill he had found on the bottom of the river. The sauce was cream, butter, a bit of flour, and a shot of The Glenlivet. Alan said there was a fisherman on the river who was known as the Marquis de Shad. I believe that was actually Alan Lieb.
We also had shad sausages. Alan had put some unboned
shad into a hand meat grinder, which kept the bones and expressed the meat. He mixed it with salt, pepper, thyme, sage, mace, marjoram, some egg white, some stale crustless bread crumbs, and grated lemon rind. He had bought sausage casings, which he limbered with water, and filled with the shad mixture, using a sausage nozzle. The sausages were dense, moist, excellent. But they tasted just like pork sausages.
Thinking aloud, he said, “You could try taking some shad bones with meat attached and pressure-cook them with a little white wine. Pour them into a Teflon pan and continue to cook them with a quarter-pound of butter and three fillets of anchovies and a quarter of a cup of capers. Then run it all through a food mill, a blender, or a processor. Put it in a jam jar, cool it, cap it, and refrigerate it. I’ll bet it would be a wonderful spread, a cross between gentleman’s relish and tapenade. Then you’d be able to truthfully say, ‘The bones are also delicious.’”
I will save that one for my old age.
Universally, asparagus is served with shad, all the better if the asparagus is also wild.
In Maritime Canada, the rites of spring incorporate shad with fiddleheads.
My late friend Grete Fvide Bang, a Norwegian, salted and peppered whole shad, stuffed the cavity with fresh dill, oiled the pan, poured in some wine, and—after fifteen minutes at three-fifty—poured in a little more wine. After thirty minutes, she peeled off the skin and straightforwardly went at the shad. To a fish-eating Norwegian, bones are beneath conversation.