John McPhee - The Founding Fish

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. Theres no need to separate the sacs at this point; they look nice in their bilateral symmetry. Place them vein-side up or vein-side downcosmetically and otherwise, it doesnt matter. You can cook two or more sets of roe sacs side by side if your skillet is largeenough. 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 grandchildrenout!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 sizzlenot 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. Dont stray too far, though. Go back every five minutes to listento be sure that the sizzling is neither too active nor extinct. The checkup is entirely aural. Youll see almost nothing through the lid but dense fog. This method is an attenuated hybrid of sauting 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 theres 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 willslide, but dont 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 isnt. Sometimes it is. I have no idea why. This is not a perfect world. If the bacon is undercookedor, more likely, undercooked here and thereremove 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. Thats all the sauce you need, andin my houseis 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, Im one of those people. The milt of the buck shadin its firm, pink podssketches 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 thatis 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 toastwhite, 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 shads semen, a calfs brain, a chickens liver, and the inside of an ox femur? You just cant sit there eating Ferdinands 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 (Lawrys, 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. Its moist and succulent; very pale, almost white after cooking. Themeat 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, andpinched between thumb and forefingerwill easily slip away. Dont 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 its 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 Gerstells American Shad in the Susquehanna River Basin who recommended against eating shad because of the difficulty of removing their bones from childrens throats. He may have been a lazy doctor.