asakiyume | shad trees, shad restrictions

When I was telling my father about the fish elevator and all those shad, he told me ~~that he'd learned from a friend that mountain laurel, which blooms around now, is known as "the shad tree"--because when it blooms, that's when the shad run.~~

He just called to tell me I'd misunderstood: It's not that mountain laurel are called shad tree, but that there's another tree, that blooms at the same time as mountain laurel, called shad tree. Actually, several trees in the genus Amelanchier go by that name, including this, Amelanchier bartramaiana, the mountain shadbush (also known as oblong serviceberry--ahh, names):

(Source)

(Here's a photo from Flickr of mountain laurel--not a shad tree or shadbush--by Flickr user Robert Ferraro--you can click through to see it larger.)

He also told me that there was a law in Boston in the 18th century that you couldn't feed apprentices shad more than twice a week... which gives you a sense of its plentifulness at that time (and its low regard). (I searched law+apprentices+shad and found confirmation in a Google books excerpt from The Literary Era: A Repository of Literary and Miscellaneous Information (published 1901), which says,

From a recently published report of the Pennsylvania Fish Commission, it would appear that similar troubles were not unknown in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. The low prices of fish tempted many master mechanics to keep their apprentices on a lenten diet. Shad were particularly common and particularly cheap--so common and so cheap, in fact, that they were considered fit only for Indians, helots, and apprentices. The apprentices revolted ... The youngsters ... triumphed so far that the law relating to indentures was changed so that the boys "were not to be fed on fish more than twice a week." (p. 298)

Crossposts: http://asakiyume.livejournal.com/863797.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lilysea

"Lobsters have not always been considered chic eats. In 17th- and 18th-century America, they were so abundant in the northeast that they were often used as fertilizer. Laws were even passed forbidding people to feed servants lobster more than twice a week."

From:

asakiyume

Yeah, and the 1901 book I was quoting from said similar about salmon in England and mutton at some point, too. Chicken, by contrast, used to be a delicacy.

From:

movingfinger

Nova Scotia-reared family members have told me that they were ashamed of bringing lobster sandwiches for their school lunches, because it showed how poor they were (and they were, and lobster was free).

From:

asakiyume

See my pessimistic remark to

amaebi, below: there's no creature so abundant but humans can make it scarce :(

From:

missroserose

I'm actually pretty sure the high prices of lobster are entirely marketing-driven - we've made it a delicacy through demand, not through rarity. Lobsters themselves are still eminently common.

...and I just checked with Google, which says it's actually a mixed story. Some stocks are doing just fine, but others (especially the one in Southern New England) are collapsing, although this seems to be more due to environmental change than overfishing. Which is still a human-driven cause, heh.

From:

lilysea

"In the 19th century, the oyster had been a staple diet of the poor. The humble bivalve was eaten in prodigious quantities. In 1860, the three oyster companies in Whitstable alone, employing more than 100 boats and over 500 people, sent 50 million tons of oysters to London. Most of them were eaten by the poorest folk. "Oysters and poverty always seem to go together," as Pickwick's Sam Weller remarked.

Beef and oyster pies and puddings had been a classic Victorian dish. The poorer you were, the more oysters you put in. Rich folk bigged up the amount of beefsteak."

From:

asakiyume

How things have changed!

From:

lilysea

How things have changed!

I wonder if it's because we no longer put untreated sewage into the water?

Oysters, being filter feeders, are prime vector for Hepatitis A etc if you put untreated sewage into the Thames...

(This would be doubly relevant back when cholera was A Thing.)

From:

asakiyume

Eeep, re: oysters and Hepatitis A!

I bet you're right about the sewage and the rebounding populations. I know some coastal areas have done habitat restoration, too.

From:

sovay

I know some coastal areas have done habitat restoration, too.

I know it is not environmentally altruistic to want sustainable seafood so that someday I can eat all the oysters I want without concern for the population, but someday I want to eat all the oysters I want.

From:

asakiyume

I'm fine with people having both altruistic and selfish motives for things ;-)

From:

sovay

I'm fine with people having both altruistic and selfish motives for things

Oh, good. Oysters taste great.

From:

lilysea

My point was that raw sewage going into the Thames etc meant

a) oysters made people sick, therefore people who could afford NOT to eat them didn't eat them,

not that

b) raw sewage meant there were less oysters, and sewage treatment meant there were more oysters.

But b) is probably true as well...

From:

asakiyume

Nodding--you're right; I jumped to the other conclusion, but I see what you're saying. It's like current dietary health risk, where if you're poor, you have a much harder time eating a non-trash diet, for lots of reasons.

From:

amaebi

I love kalmia and its architectural flowers!

Chun Woo marvels as often as we eat them that oysters and lobsters used to be considered low-class trashy food.

From:

asakiyume

I said depressingly to Wakanomori that there's no creature so plentiful but human beings will end up making it a rarity (hello passenger pigeon and buffalo). But sometimes we see the harm we've done and work to rectify it.

From:

sovay

mountain laurel, which blooms around now, is known as "the shad tree"--because when it blooms, that's when the shad run.

I knew this and I have no idea why. I like the idea of it being a fish tree, though, glittering with scales in spring, laden with roe in the fall.

From:

asakiyume

Yes, I feel the same way! And yes, like the tree has some existential connection with shad.

From:

cmcmck

The same rules applied to apprentices and salmon here!

From:

asakiyume

Yes, the book I found mentioned that on the same page.

From:

ex_cafenowhere544

I like the synonymy of the laurel and shad. I wonder, What if their populations waxed and waned together? What if, in the universe's calculus, mountain laurel = shad, for no causal reason?

From:

asakiyume

I like that idea very much. Just an other-place buddy. Like strawberries and red herrings (and actually, strawberries are in bloom now too, and shad are a type of herring...)

The old man of the wilderness asked of me
How many strawberries grow in the sea
I answered him as I thought good
As many red herrings as swim in the wood.

From:

osprey_archer

What a beautiful tree. I don't believe I've ever seen a mountain laurel before. I love the delicate precise dots of dark red - it looks almost like an embroidery pattern.

From:

asakiyume

I love it when a flower is **unnecessarily* fancy--when it just... really goes to town with how it looks.

mountain laurel: "I'm going to have fancy crimped petals, and little dots, and pretty stamens, and furthermore when I'm in bud, the buds will look like little stars."

cinqfoil: "I ... I'm just going with, y'know, five petals a-around a center. That's it."

And yet the simple flowers are so pretty too. WHAT A GREAT WORLD.

From:

ivy

Huh, for some reason I thought mountain laurel would be more like rowan. Interesting to see that I was wrong!

I am particularly amused by the laws since if I pass my SAR exam next month, I'll be an Apprentice tracker, haha. Fish forever!

From:

asakiyume

An apprentice tracker---that is **SO COOL**

And yeah, wouldn't it be great if we could eat all those things that were cheap as dirt back in the day but are now luxuries?

From:

rimturse

Oh how cool about the law! We had similar local ones here, but with salmon and farm helpers.

From:

asakiyume

Salmon seems to have been a really common one. Hard to believe--now salmon's such a treat.

From:

rimturse

It is. Our area has had a big restoration project with Skjern Å, both with the return of the wetlands and the Skjern Å salmon. The results have been amazing. The salmon fishing is still regulated, but the numbers are very strong. Makes one think what else could be done - and it's been really good for tourism.

From:

petrichor_pirate

I like the idea of the apprentices revolting and there being a law made for it. It puts tge lie to the concept that "back in the old times" all the young'uns did whatever their elders wanted all the time.

From:

heliopausa

I'm reading these entries backwards and late (but not in high heels) so I understand that the story of the shad tree showing when the shad are running got a bit mixed in the telling, but I want to say that when the purple bang lang flowers, the tertiary students are having exams was the first botanic-calendar link I learned in Vietnam. :)