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Baked Shad

A whole shad stuffed with a forcemeat of bread crumbs, salt pork, butter, and parsley, baked and served with a lemon‑flavored gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Baked Shad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and wipe the shad inside and out.

  2. Prepare a forcemeat with bread crumbs, fat salt pork, butter, minced parsley, salt, and pepper.

  3. Stuff the forcemeat into the fish and sew it up.

Bake

  1. Place the shad in a dripping pan and pour boiling water over it.

  2. Bake covered for at least 1 hour, basting five times with butter and water.

  3. Transfer the shad to a hot serving dish.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Make the gravy by stirring lemon juice and browned flour mixed with cold water into the pan juices.

  2. Boil the gravy sharply and serve in a gravy boat.

  3. Garnish the shad with lemon slices topped with finely bruised parsley and serve with mashed potatoes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Shad
Forms the main body of the dish, and its flesh cooks through during the covered bake.
Bread crumbs
Absorb juices and fat in the forcemeat, giving it a moist, soft body inside the fish.
Fat salt pork
Melts during baking, adding fat that keeps the forcemeat and fish moist and flavourful.
Browned flour
Thickens the pan juices into gravy and adds a toasted, deeper flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich fat of the fish and gravy.

The step that matters

Mixing the browned flour with cold water before adding it to the pan. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps, because its starch swells unevenly. Blending it smoothly in cold water first lets the starch disperse so the gravy thickens evenly when boiled.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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