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Stuffed Shad

A whole shad stuffed with salt pork, baked, served with browned butter sauce and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Stuffed Shad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Stuff the shad as you would a fowl and sew it up.

  2. Dredge the fish with salt, pepper, and flour.

Bake

  1. Lay 4-5 thin slices of salt pork in a baking pan.

  2. Place the stuffed fish on top of the pork slices.

  3. Cover the fish with more thinly sliced pork.

  4. Pour in ½ cup of boiling water.

  5. Bake for 12 minutes per pound.

Serve

  1. Serve with browned butter sauce seasoned with lemon juice and a glass of claret.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Flour and butter 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, providing the flesh that cooks moist under the pork.
Salt pork
Bastes the fish from above and below as it renders, adding fat and savory flavor.
Flour
Dusting the fish helps form a light coating that promotes gentle browning.
Claret
Adds acidity and wine flavor to the serving sauce.

The step that matters

Bake for 12 minutes per pound. Fish cooks quickly and dries out when overbaked, so timing by weight matters. Check for flaking at the thickest part to avoid a dry result.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, flour, pork, butter, sauce):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Limefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, pork, butter, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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