Are the best boiled or fried—they will do to broil, but are not so good as cooked in any other way.
Fresh shad are good baked or boiled, but better broiled. For broiling, they should have a good deal of salt and pepper sprinkled on the inside of them, and remain several hours before broiling. The spawn and liver are good boiled or fried. Salt shad and mackerel, for broiling, should be soaked ten or twelve hours in cold water. Salt shad, for boiling, need not be soaked only long enough to get off the scales, without you like them quite fresh—if so, turn boiling water on them, and let them soak in it an hour—then put them into fresh boiling water, and boil them twenty minutes. To pickle shad, mix one pound of sugar, a peck of rock salt, two quarts of blown salt, and a quarter of a pound of salt-petre. Allow this quantity to every twenty-five shad. Put a layer of the mixture at the bottom of the keg, then a layer of cleaned shad, with the skin side down. Sprinkle on another layer of salt, sugar, and salt-petre, and so on till you get in all the shad. Lay a heavy weight on the shad, to keep it under the brine. If the juice of the shad does not run out so as to form brine sufficient to cover them, in the course of a week, make a little brine, and turn on to them.
Sturgeons are good boiled or baked, but better fried. Before baking it, boil it about fifteen minutes, to extract the strong oily taste, and when baked, to eight or ten pounds of it put a quart of water into the pan, and bake it till tender. (See directions for baking fish, [No. 76].) The part next to the tail is the best for baking or frying. Sturgeons are very nice, cooked in the following manner. Cut it in slices nearly an inch thick—fry a few slices of pork—when brown, take them up, and put in the sturgeon. When a good brown color, take them up, and stir in a little flour and water, mixed smoothly together. Season the gravy with salt, pepper, and catsup—stir in a little butter, and wine if you like, then put back the sturgeon, and let it stew a few minutes in the gravy. While the sturgeon is cooking, make force meat balls of part of the sturgeon and salt pork—fry and use them as a garnish for the fish.
Cold boiled fresh fish, or salt codfish, is nice minced fine, with potatoes, moistened with a little water, and a little butter put in, done up into cakes of the size of common biscuit, and fried brown in pork fat or butter.
Take a little uncooked fish, chop it fine, together with a little raw salt pork, mix it with one or two raw eggs, a few bread crumbs, and season the whole with pepper and spices. Add a little catsup if you like—do them up into small balls, and fry them till brown.