The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

Assembling California

  Looking for a Ship

  The Control of Nature

  Rising from the Plains

  Table of Contents

  La Place de la Concorde Suisse

  In Suspect Terrain

  Basin and Range

  Giving Good Weight

  Coming into the Country

  The Survival of the Bark Canoe

  Pieces of the Frame

  The Curve of Binding Energy

  The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed

  Encounters with the Archdruid

  The Crofter and the Laird

  Levels of the Game

  A Roomful of Hovings

  The Pine Barrens

  Oranges

  The Headmaster

  A Sense of Where You Are

  The John McPhee Reader

  The Second John McPhee Reader

  APPENDIX

  COOKING SHAD

  All you need is a stove, yes, but it helps to have a cast-iron skillet with a tight-fitting glass lid, if you like shad roe. Before going into this appendix, I should declare that it is not intended as a survey of shad cookery or extensive collection of shad recipes. First, I want to describe how I cook shad roe, then milt, then fillets unboned and boned, then whole shad. I will put all the personal experience up front and then gradually work in some things I don’t often do—or, more likely, know how to do—that others do and have done. My way of cooking roe I learned from another fisherman many years ago, and I promptly stopped sautéing it in the conventional manner.

  SHAD ROE

  Cover the bottom of the cast-iron skillet with bacon, thick-sliced if you want to go sooner. Snip the bacon to fit. One contiguous layer will do. There’s no need to separate the sacs at this point; they look nice in their bilateral symmetry. Place them vein-side up or vein-side down—cosmetically and otherwise, it doesn’t matter. You can cook two or more sets of roe sacs side by side if your skillet is large enough. The ones I use are nine inches across the top and seven inches across the base, with glass lids. Salt and pepper the roe sacs. Cover the pan. Put it on the burner at medium heat, and do not go away. Do not answer the telephone. Exile wives, children, and even grandchildren—out!—for a couple of minutes while you listen. After the bacon begins to sizzle, turn down the heat to the lowest level you are able to achieve without turning the burner off. Shad roe can explode if steam inside it builds up too rapidly. What you want to hear is a low, regular, consistent sizzle—not the sound of bacon rapidly crisping. If your lowest heat level is too vigorous, slip a wire spacer or heat diffuser under the pan, or some other device to hobble the burner.

  Now set your timer for thirty-five minutes. Relax your injunctions on your family. Don’t stray too far, though. Go back every five minutes to listen—to be sure that the sizzling is neither too active nor extinct. The checkup is entirely aural. You’ll see almost nothing through the lid but dense fog. This method is an attenuated hybrid of sautéing and steaming. The bacon becomes watery and the roe gradually tightens up in steam. Cook it until it is quite firm. Thirty-five minutes should do it, less if the roe sacs are small. The ideal result, in cross-section, is wet in the middle with an aureole of dryer eggs. With a couple of minutes to go, put on your oven mitts, take hold of the lid handle and the pan handle, and pour off the accumulated water and bacon melt into the kitchen garbage wadded with paper towels. Employ the lid to prevent the roe from falling out of the skillet. Put the pan back on the stove, uncovered, and turn the heat back up to medium, so the bacon can brown. Just pray there’s no explosion. If one occurs at this point, though, it will probably be a small one, and the damage will be minor.

  At the end of the thirty-five minutes, gingerly feel around with a small spatula and free up any bacon that is sticking to the pan. Jiggle things a little and make sure that the roe-and-bacon will slide, but don’t attempt with the spatula to turn anything over. Cover the skillet with an upside-down serving plate. With one hand on the pan handle and the other spread flat on the bottom of the plate, flip the skillet. Set the skillet aside. On the serving plate the finished roe is concealed beneath a thatch of bacon, beautifully hued by carbon fixing, its circular dimensions framed by the edge of the plate.

  The bacon may be undercooked. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it is. I have no idea why. This is not a perfect world. If the bacon is undercooked—or, more likely, undercooked here and there—remove the offending strips, finish them off in the skillet (or the microwave), and repair the thatch. Seen out in the light, the cooked roe is cosmetically disadvantaged, in that the veins are evident and there has been no browning. In my view, it is a mistake to try to brown the roe purely for aesthetic reasons. The dish is quite attractive with its roof of bacon.

  Chop the ends off a lemon, render it hexapartite, and sit down. That’s all the sauce you need, and—in my house—is all you are going to get. You have your shad roe. You … are … in … business!

  MILT

  In “The Market Assistant, Containing a Brief Description of Every Article of Human Food Sold in the Public Markets of the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn” (1867), Thomas De Voe reported that not a few people prefer shad milt to shad roe. On some days, I’m one of those people. The milt of the buck shad—in its firm, pink pods—sketches the same bilateral outline as shad roe, but is thin and lies flat. The milt within has the consistency of heavy cream and is as white as the whitest quartz. The matrix is water. The sperm cells are white and opaque. But all that is invisible, being well sealed in its encasing membrane. In euphemious. England, milt is called soft roe. The French call it laitances Salt and pepper the pods. Shake flour over them, lightly. Saute them in butter and oil. Pan-fry them as if they were eggs. Place them on soft variable toast—white, whole wheat, sourdough, Russian rye. This dish bestows status on the buck shad. It is reminiscent of the marrow in osso bucco. The word for it is not semen but savory. In England, herring milt on toast is served at the end of dinner as a savoury. American shad semen, after all, is herring milt. On toast, with squeezed lemon, it is melting with freshness. If you had your choice between shad semen and a pink-icinged Pop-Tart, which would be more acceptable? Which would you take between a shad’s semen, a calf’s brain, a chicken’s liver, and the inside of an ox femur? You just can’t sit there eating Ferdinand’s tongue and talk that way about shad milt, so cut it out.

  UNBONED FILLETS

  Lay out the fillet, slice away the ribs, sprinkle with lemon pepper (Lawry’s, if you can find it), and broil, about nine inches below the heat. As noted in Chapter 12, if shad fillets are put in a broiler very soon after swimming, they will rise like bread as they brown. As shad muscle broils, it will soften before it sets. After eleven or twelve minutes, it will almost be soup. At fifteen and a half minutes, it is firm and just done. Past sixteen, it is overdone. The window is that narrow. Moreover, the window moves around from stove to stove, because stoves are idiosyncratic. So if fifteen and a half minutes is not your windowsill, better luck next time. Add or subtract thirty seconds until you find it.

  The meat itself is easily on a par with pompano. It’s moist and succulent; very pale, almost white after cooking. The meat is so exquisitely delicate you must force yourself not to overcook it.

  —RUSSELL CHATHAM, Fly Fisherman, 1979

  When the fillet is on a plate and you have lots of fresh lemon to squeeze on it, sit down under a bright light. Slide a fork into the meat, and lift. In many places, you can raise a boneless forkful. When intermuscular bones come up with the flesh, they protrude glistening, and—pinched between thumb and forefinger—will easily slip away. Don’t try to be thorough. Take what you can conveniently get. You will not be lonely, even if you are alone. Eating unboned shad requires so much concentration it’s as if you were eating with someone else. And you can do it with great pleasure. Never mind the nineteenth-century Pennsylvania doctor mentioned in Richard Gerstell’s “American Shad in the Susquehanna River Basin” who “recommended against eating
shad because of the difficulty of removing their bones from children’s throats.” He may have been a lazy doctor.

  A shad-bone anthology would fill a thick volume. “The champion place for getting up an appetite for shad is at a Brooklyn boarding-house,” said the anonymous nineteenth-century author of “A Dissertation on Shad” (Chapter 12). A boarder, having been told that dinner will be shad, arrives at table wearing “the poorest shirt he has,” and carrying a magnifying glass, a bone basket, a toothpick, and tweezers. “He will get so full of the bony parts that he will sigh for a little more Bourbon. When he swallows a bone, all he has to do is to take his tweezers and pull it out …”

  “The shad-bone season for thumping people on the back is almost here,” said the Columbia, Pennsylvania, Columbia Spy in the spring of 1880. (Dr. Heimlich may have had shad in mind when he invented his maneuver.) In “The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Brittania” (1612), William Strachey, First Secretary of the Jamestown colony, wrote that the rivers of Virginia Brittania (“a country in America”) had “no meane commoditie of fish,” including “shaddes, great store, of a yard long, and for sweetnes and fatnes a reasonable good fish, he is only full of small bones, like our barbells in England.” Nearly four centuries later, Ruth Spear, writing in the New York Post, described American shad as “gastronomically the finest of all white fish but with a maddening number of bones.” So there is a certain consistency in writers’ reports on this aspect of this fish, but for me the broiled unboned fillet remains the most appealing way to present a plate of shad. If you think you are eating a Norway spruce, pay closer attention. Avoid conversation. Are we eating or talking?

  BONED FILLETS

  Broil as above, and consume them with an arsenal of freshly wedged lemons. A shad has plenty of adipose tissue. It comes with its own nutty butter—the fat it is living on while eating nothing on the spawning run. That’s why it is sapidissima. To a large extent it is self-seasoned. And it will baste itself. Amazingly, for such a fish, it can be successfully frozen, retaining most of its flavor. But eat it all up before Christmas. For variety, I sometimes spoon over the fillets a two-to-one mixture of soy sauce and sesame oil full of chopped scallions. I put it on before broiling and add a little toward the end. Sometimes I include lemon juice, and incorporate bits of fresh ginger instead of the scallions. You can decide whether the sesame-soy concoction deepens the taste or disguises it. It’s good, surely, but the shad doesn’t need it.

  WHOLE BAKED SHAD

  Ever since I learned how they cook whole shad in the Maritime Provinces of Canada (Chapter 6), I have seldom done it another way. You make turkey stuffing, stuff the fish, bake it for thirty-five minutes at three hundred and fifty degrees, and eat it. Canadians told me to bake the shad with the scales on, but if I did that it would superalienate the person with whom I share the kitchen. If there is one thing in this world she detests, it’s a shad scale. No one knows why. As far as I can make out, she finds it inconvenient that they are nearly invisible and—in drains and drainpipes—can laminate themselves in a manner that could bankrupt Roto-Rooter. I therefore suggest that you remove the scales, and with them the head, tail, and fins. Salt and pepper the skin and the empty cavity. Pack it up with turkey stuffing until the filled gap between the belly flaps is something like two inches. During the thirty-five baking minutes, you don’t need to roll the fish over. On a serving platter, cant it upward, more or less on its back, and open it as you would a trout. Choose your own instruments. I use two fish servers—or two small spatulas. At any rate, you cause the shad to split open, and the sides to lie down symmetrically on the platter. Then you lift away the backbone and ribs. The white muscle shines like polished marble and is very moist and tender. A man in Doaktown told me not to eat it with a knife and fork, calling it “finger food.” Suit yourself. I eat it with a fork in one hand and a wedge of lemon in the other. The stuffing, meanwhile, has been enhanced by the nutty essence of American shad.

  So much for my predilections. For at least two hundred years people have stuffed shad with oysters and baked them in parchment, but I haven’t tried that. I also haven’t tried this way of cooking shad, which was taught by the Lenape to white settlers on the Delaware River, according to Mrs. J. Ernest Scott’s “Cooking Shad by the Open Fire,” a paper read before the Bucks County Historical Society in 1912:

  We gathered some reference of this method of cooking shad in the early days. It was not likely it was ever used in the home, but was probably sometimes used in the open and in the fishing camps along the river where no suitable cooking utensils were at hand. A freshly caught shad was rubbed against the scales and gills with soft mud from the river bank. When this had set a little the whole fish was rolled in a thick blanket of clay. It was then allowed to dry in the heat before the fire for some fifteen minutes, then it was buried in the hot coals and ashes till the clay was baked hard and the fish was thought to be well done. It was then raked out of the fire and cracked open. The fish readily split open, the head was removed, the insides, shrunk to a little ball, were scraped off and the scales adhered to the clay. A little salt was dusted over it. A dish thus prepared was fit for a king.

  On the Susquehanna, early European settlers called shad May Fish—in German, Maifisch, in dialect Moifisch. William Woys Weaver preserves this baked-shad recipe, from about 1900, in his “Pennsylvania Dutch Country Cooking” (Abbeville Press, 1993). I have shortened it slightly by deleting gram equivalents. The recipe calls for a buck shad, because it was thought that males were lighter, juicier, and more flavorful than females, a prejudice that is lost on me. I can’t agree.

  G’BACKENER MOIFISCH MIT GRAUT UN TOMATTS

  3 tablespoons unsalted butter

  1 cup plain breadcrumbs

  1½ tablespoons minced fresh parsley

  2 tablespoons minced fresh chives

  1 teaspoon minced fresh winter savory or

  ½ teaspoon dried savory

  1 three-to-four-pound buck shad, gutted and cleaned but

  with head and tail left on

  6 cups finely shredded cabbage, resembling angel hair

  noodles

  1 cup shredded sorrel

  1 cup chopped onion

  1 cup peeled, seeded, and chopped fresh tomatoes

  cup dry white wine

  4 slices country smoked slab bacon

  Preheat the oven to 350 F. Melt the butter in a skillet and fry the breadcrumbs until straw colored, stirring constantly to prevent scorching (3 to 4 minutes). Add the parsley, chives, and savory, and remove from the heat.

  Open the shad and cut the cavity from the head toward the tail with a sharp knife so that the fish opens out flat when lying on its back. To accomplish this, press down with the point of the knife under the neck and follow the backbone so that all the “rib” bones are cut at their bases. Fill the cavity with the browned breadcrumb mixture, then sew it up with trussing thread.

  Poach the cabbage in salted water for 3 to 4 minutes to tenderize it, then drain and combine with the sorrel, onion, and tomatoes. Cover the bottom of a shallow roasting pan with the cabbage mixture, then lay the stuffed shad on top of it. Pour the wine on top, then drape the bacon slices diagonally at even intervals over the fish. Bake for approximately 40 minutes, depending on the size of the fish. Baste from time to time with liquid from the pan. When the fish tests done, serve immediately.

  After Charles Dickens travelled by canal boat between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh in late March, 1842, he wrote in his “American Notes” that he was served “salmon, shad, liver, steaks, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings and sausages” for breakfast, and “salmon, shad, liver, steaks, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings and sausages” for dinner, and “salmon, shad, liver, steaks, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings and sausages” for supper. Had he lived until Chapter 2, he would have been at home with Boyd Kynard on the Danube.

  In the nineteenth century, more so than now, people boiled whole shad, as in these
1849 instructions from “Frank Forester’s Fish and Fishing of the United States and British Provinces of North America”: “Scale, open, clean, and wash your fish; boil him quickly, wrapped in a napkin, in boiling water; serve upon a napkin, garnished with fried parsley; eat with caper sauce.”

  My friend Lynne Fagles bakes whole shad at three hundred degrees for an hour and a quarter. In and around the fish, she includes flat-leaf parsley, chopped onions and scallions, celery, wine, oil, and lemon juice.

  Ed Cervone’s wife, Marian, bakes a layered assemblage—shad fillets under and over shad roe. First, she picks the bones out of the fillets one by one by hand. I have from time to time asked myself, What did he do to deserve it? The lower fillet is flesh side up, the upper fillet is flesh side down. Several strips of bacon go on top. She pours in at least half a cup of white wine, lays a sheet of foil above the whole edifice, bakes it for an hour at three-fifty and serves it with fresh lemon.

  When Pierre Franey was chef poissonnier at the Pavilion, in New York, half a century ago, he improvised Alose farcie, stuffing it largely with roe: “I boned the shad and filleted it. Then I spread the shad with a mousse of sole, with bread crumbs, hard-cooked eggs, shallots, salt, pepper, parsley, and cream. I put the roe over one fillet, covered it with the other fillet, topped it with sliced mushrooms, then tied it and baked it with shallots, thyme, and bay leaf. I served the shad with a sauce made of the fish juices, white wine, cream, and beurre manié.”

  A related method is suggested by my friend Alan Lieb, who is in the river with his face mask and fins even more than he is on it with his rods and reels. On the bottom of the much-canoed Delaware, he picks up spinning rods, cell phones, car keys, Cannon towels, Swiss Army knives, and shad darts. With the rods and the darts he later catches shad that he cooks in various ways, including this way, which he wrote out for me a few years ago: