The Caribbean Connection

The salting of shad and herring, and to a lesser degree of rockfish, was once a major industry along the Delaware, Schuylkill, and Susquehanna rivers. Shad, herring, and rockfish formed the “spring trinity” of the Pennsylvania diet between the end of March and the end of June; this was one of the major regional differences between the cookery of the Pennsylvania Dutch Homeland and that in areas settled by the Dutch beyond Pennsylvania. These three fish were often depicted in our regional folk art, one laid over the other as though they were spinning like rays of the sun. The importance of this imagery to the Dutch cannot be overstated because it was toward the sun that all those fish were shipped.