A Tale of Two Fishes

by Shankar Chaudhuri

After a bitter winter, spring has finally arrived in the New York area with its usual burst of color: a succession of crocuses, daffodils, forsythias, hyacinths, cherries, tulips, and magnolias have already adorned the landscape of suburbia and city parks and boulevards, soon to be followed by the arrival of dogwood, lilac, azalea and rhododendron blossoms that will cascade into the summer.

But personally what also heightens my anticipation for the spring is a particular icon that has a special resonance for me since my childhood and youth in India. It’s in the spring when shad – the American synonym of what Indians refer to as hilsha fish and Bengalis much lovingly illis maachh - reappears in the rivers along the east coast for spawning. Pretty soon high end restaurants in New York such as Four Seasons, Grand Central Oyster Bar, and Gramercy Tavern will include shad roe in their seasonal lunch or dinner menu.

Shad in America must be news for most Indians and it must come close to an affront to most Bengalis who tend to think that they have exclusive ownership of this mythical fish. If there is anything that unites otherwise divisive and argumentative Bengalis it is their love for shad and a recipe that calls for it to be steamed in a paste of fresh mustard, green chilies, yogurt and shredded coconut.

But Bengalis should also take comfort from the fact that their most venerable fish has an iconic status and august history in America as well.

A member of the herring family, shad - fittingly called in Latin Alosa sapidissima or the “most delicious” - made up the dinner menus of many rank and file Americans from the colonial times well into the twentieth century.  By the end of the nineteenth century shad had become so ensconced in the American diet that The Philadelphia Record observed in 1904, “Of all fishes of America shad may be regarded as the most popular; it appears on the table of the wealthy epicure as a delicacy; while to the unpampered palate of the workingman it forms a substantial and nourishing dish.”

Pulitzer Prize winning author John McPhee in his unique work The Founding Fish has extensively documented how shad captured the imagination of the residents of the colonies soon after they settled down along the north east coast of the United States. According to McPhee’s account, for almost sixteen years preceding the American Revolution, George Washington had been a successful farmer and a commercial shad fisherman.  In 1771 alone he was reported to have caught 7,760 American shad, McPhee informs us. Washington marketed them for profits, earning on average ten shillings per hundred shad, and shipped them to as far as Antigua with own his name marked on the barrels, adds McPhee. 

And then there is the story of shad in shaping the very destiny of the United States. During the revolutionary war, the Continental Army, while anchored in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania under Washington’s leadership, was on the verge of collapse due to starvation during the harsh winter of 1778. Washington himself hinted at the possibility of a mutiny or desertion in his army:  “Rations dwindled and soldiers were driven to scavenge…Morale ebbed…Provisions were nearly gone by the end of March, with little hope of finding food…,” he wrote. It was precisely at this point when everything appeared to be hopeless that suddenly a mass army of shad appeared in the Pennsylvania Rivers, almost a week or two ahead of their yearly spring migration. Freshly nourished from a diet of smoked shad, volunteers in Washington’s army reportedly gained back enough strength and vigor to ward off the advances of the colonial army and ultimately win the war against the British.

Another shad tale also goes back to the American Revolution. After the massacre of Patriots by Loyalists and their allies Iroquois Indians, in the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania in 1778, the administrators of the frontier town decided to set aside the first catch of the shad haul season to the widowed and their bereaved families. This generous practice continued for more than a decade and is still known in the area as the "widow's haul."

Still another story relates to the impact of shad during the American Civil War. The Battle of Five Forks on April 1, 1865 is generally considered to be a turning point in the Civil War when Union troops successfully stormed and overran Confederate general Lee’s positions resulting in the fall of Petersburg and the Confederate capital of Richmond. But the success of the Union troops was reportedly facilitated by the absence of Confederate General George E. Pickett and his senior officers at their key positions on the front lines. The general and his men had reportedly left the lines for a long lunch, a shad bake with Fitzhugh Lee, Robert Lee’s nephew.  For Picket and his officers the taste of the first spring harvest was perhaps too tantalizing to pass up. The "food was abundant," the historian Douglas Southall Freeman has written, and "the affair was leisured and deliberate as every feast should be." But the damage had been done. It was hard to recover from the blow. Gen Robert Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House just eight days later, on April 9.

Thus one could argue that shad not only saved the American Revolution, it also saved the Union. Most historians will probably continue to be skeptical if shad indeed played such a pivotal role in two of the most momentous events in US history, but the fact that shad came to be associated with them and other stories is probably indicative of the hallowed status it has enjoyed in America. 

It was probably natural that a legendary fish like shad with its unique determination to travel hundreds, if not thousands, of miles back to the waters of its birth for spawning should capture the attention of no other than Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau agonized over the trauma of the shad for not being able to reach the spawning grounds that were blocked by man-made dams and other artificial constructs. Thoreau had nothing but praise for shad’s resilience and its ultimate acceptance of its destiny with poise and equanimity. One may very well find a parallel between Thoreau’s civil disobedience against unjust laws and the image of the shad desperately trying to find a way to complete its reproductive journey against thousand odds. It could only be fitting that shad was mentioned in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s eulogy - one of the finest in the English language - at Thoreau’s funeral in 1862.

More recently, famous American composer Cole Porter celebrated shad in the song ("Let's Do It/Let’s Fall in Love"): “Why ask if shad do it/Waiter bring me shad roe.” The song resonated with two of the most famous Jazz musicians of our times, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday.  Both of them provided voice rendition to Porter’s song.

But perhaps one of the most lasting impacts of shad in America has been at the community level. A whole slew of festivals along the east coast from North Carolina to New York have been celebrating the return of shad and river herring to the waters of their birth for decades. These festivals have given rise to a genre of activities from arts and crafts shows to music concerts to fairs to tasting of freshly caught shad itself. The local economies have also benefited from diverse types of activities involving fishing instruments, boat making, carpentry, and of course exporting shad to various regions of the country.

Real shad aficionados in America may also harbor the wishful thinking or argue that perhaps shad could even bridge the political divisiveness between the two major political parties. Virginia’s Annual Shad Planking originally starting as a tribute to the start of the fishing season has gained in political importance as well. Last year’s 66th Annual Shad Planking in Wakefield, Virginia served as the setting for the kicking off of the senatorial race between Sen Mark Warner, a Democrat and his potential Republican opponent Ed Gillespie. While the subtext of the gathering was decidedly political, the outward mood was convivial and bipartisan, reported the local paper Daily Press. The paper almost expressed the wishful thinking if “fried shad and shad roe in combination with beer and blue grass music have the effect of calming the nerves, irrespective of political affiliations?”  

In spite of its storied history, shad’s role as a staple diet in many American homes has diminished over the overs. Some of the main reasons have been its dwindling supply due to river pollution, overfishing and dam construction. It’s encouraging that the shad population has finally taken off on the Pacific Coast after a species of the Hudson River variety had been transplanted into the Sacramento River in 1871. Real shad aficionados however might argue whether shad has the same cache and pedigree on the west coast as it has had in the east coast, its original habitat. More recently, thanks to preservation efforts, shad appears to have made a comeback in the Delaware rivers in much larger numbers than before.

It would be interesting to add a post-script to this discussion.  During her Town Hall meeting in Kolkata three years ago, then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, in warming up to the audience made reference to how she discovered the great Indian poet and thinker Tagore in college, and how she has been a great fan of the poet ever since. Had she been briefed properly by her staff in the State Department (including the local consular officials in Kolkata), she could also have referred to the love of shad as a connecting bond between Bengalis and Americans. Mentioning of this little known fact on the culinary front would have enabled her to instantly win over the audience!

Featured in The Statesman

May 17, 2015