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Baked Shad

Baked shad stuffed with bread crumbs, pork, butter, and parsley, then baked and served with 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, parsley, salt, and pepper.

  3. Stuff the forcemeat into the fish and sew the fish closed.

Bake

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

  2. Cover the shad and bake for at least 1 hour.

  3. Baste the shad 5 times with butter-and-water.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Transfer the shad to a hot serving dish.

  2. Stir lemon juice and browned flour mixed with cold water into the pan juices to make the gravy.

  3. Boil the gravy sharply.

  4. Serve the gravy in a gravy boat.

  5. Garnish the shad with lemon slices and bruised parsley.

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

Bread crumbs
Bind the forcemeat and give it body so the stuffing holds together inside the fish.
Fat salt pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the forcemeat, keeping it moist as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the stuffing and basting liquid, promoting browning on the surface.
Browned flour
Thickens the pan juices into a gravy and adds a toasted, roasted flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the gravy and balances the richness of the fish and fat.

The step that matters

Boil the gravy sharply. Browned flour thickens only when it reaches a boil, and it must be stirred smoothly into the liquid first so lumps do not form. A sharp boil fully cooks the starch, giving a smooth, properly thickened gravy.

“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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