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Baked Shad

Baked Shad is a whole fish stuffed with bread crumbs, parsley, salt pork, and butter, then baked and garnished with lemon, potato balls, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Wipe the shad with a clean towel and rub it well with coarse sea salt.

  2. Make a dressing by mixing bread crumbs, chopped parsley, salt, pepper, and melted butter.

  3. Stuff the fish with the dressing and sew it up with soft yarn.

  4. Score one side of the fish about two inches apart and insert strips of salt pork into each gash.

  5. Place slices of salt pork on the bottom of a baking dish and rest the fish on top.

  6. Dredge the fish thickly with salt, pepper, and flour.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a warm oven at 400°F (200°C) for 15 minutes for every pound of fish.

  2. Garnish with lemon slices, potato balls, and parsley before serving.

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. Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  5. Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Shad
Provides the main body of the dish, cooking through in the oven while staying moist inside the stuffing.
Stale bread crumbs
Soak up melted butter and juices in the stuffing, giving it a moist, tender texture.
Salt pork
Renders fat as it bakes, basting the fish and adding savory richness.
Melted butter
Adds fat to the dressing, carrying flavor and keeping the stuffing moist.
Flour
Coats the outside of the fish, helping the surface brown and form a crust in the oven.

The step that matters

Scoring and stuffing the fish before baking. Stuffing must be sewn firmly and salt pork pressed into the scored gashes so the fish holds together and bastes as it cooks. Loose stuffing can fall out and dry the flesh during the bake.

“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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