Middle Atlantic States: Native Shad and Sturgeon

When an anonymous Englishman visited the Delaware valley in the sixteenth century, he was amazed by the variety of fish. In a letter to England, he wrote about the four months of the year starting in the early spring when there was a bountiful amount of both shad (the largest fish of the herring family) and sturgeon (an exoskeleton fish known for caviar). Both the shad and the sturgeon would ascend the Delaware, Hudson, and Susquehanna rivers every year from the Delaware, Hudson, and Chesapeake bays to spawn and then return to the bays. The Native Americans caught shad in weirs by the thousands, and archaeological evidence of shad bones documents the use of shad in their diet. The Swedish and Dutch settlers borrowed the Native American practices of drying and smoking shad and sturgeon and added European preservation processes such as pickling and salting. A typical Dutch feast of the mid-seventeenth century might include strips of smoked shad and sturgeon.