Shad bakes are a dance of heat and timing that have been going on for generations up and down the East Coast of the United States for more than 100 years.
September 6, 2017 — Joseph Shea presides over a culinary jigsaw puzzle. He and his apprentices squat around a hexagonal fire, shifting slabs of wood with fish nailed to them against the heat. Flames lick at angled oak planks, coaxing out the oils of the American shad, Connecticut’s state fish, and cooking it to a delicate crust just steps away from where it was spawned.
At a call from the bake master, a fire-tender hoists a numbered plank from the heat source and hurries it across the lawn, where a team of workers unhinge half a dozen fish from their crucifix and pass the plate to the server with assembly-line accuracy: gill to gullet in 30 minutes or less.
This dance of heat and timing has been going on up and down the East Coast of the United States for more than 100 years. Though home-planked shad can be traced back to early 18th-Century cookbooks, large-scale shad bakes similar to Shea’s began in the late 1800s, when savvy travel marketers used the events as a way to entice an emerging middle class to the suburbs for entertainment and a taste of country life.
Today, the tradition is kept alive by civic organisations, most famously in the tiny Connecticut hamlet of Essex, which has held an annual Rotary Club shad bake since 1958.
This unique way of cooking large amounts of shad is a rite of spring in my home state of Connecticut. The filleted fish, its 1,000 tiny bones expertly removed, is nailed to boards and circled around a roaring fire. Angled in such a way and blackened by decades of reuse, the planks help release the excess fish’s oils into a pan below to make the fish light, imparting a flavour that cannot easily be replicated outside of an open fire.
The resulting delicacy, sometimes compared to a lean salmon, requires little else beyond the smoky taste of the fire – and strip of salt pork fat and a smattering of paprika for added flavour, applied to the fish before it hits the flame.