The Typewriter Chronicles: How (Not) To Cook A Shad

Ask the guy behind the counter what he can tell you about the cheapest fish he sells. Ignore him when he tells you that the shad is incredibly difficult to cook. Marvel at how cheap it is to purchase an entire three-pound fish, complete with the head still attached. Ignore the man who warns you that there are so many bones in a shad that it is known as a “porcupine turned inside-out.” Feel confident that even though you have never deboned a fish, it should be no problem at all. Be terribly wrong.

Bring the fish home and stare at the size of the creature you have just purchased. Feel the weight of the bag, and how the paper surrounding the fish has dampened with fish blood or guts or whatever seeps out of a dead sea creature.

Unwrap the fish and hold it triumphantly in the air. Continue your feeling of confidence as testosterone buzzes through the air.

Watch a YouTube video that oversimplifies the process of removing the bones from the fish and forget it all the moment you pick up your knife.

Start by chopping off the head.

The man in the YouTube video was able to chop through in one swift motion, so attempt to recreate this. Realize that your knife is not nearly as sharp as his, and saw back and forth rapidly for a few minutes as gracefully as you can.

Eventually, cut through the shad and remove the head.

Feel bad about beheading this innocent fish, and decide to give it a little loving to make up for your murderous ways.

Start your first cut at the end of the fish, near the tail. Vaguely recall that this may or may not have been the first cut made in the YouTube video you watched earlier, but proceed with confidence nonetheless.

Realize again that your knife is much duller than the one used in the video, and struggle to stay in line with the spine as you cut down the shad’s back.

Save every small piece of boneless fish that you accidentally cut off, for there will be many, many more pieces you will remove that are littered with bones. Every bit counts.

Continue to cut down the spine until you can open up the fish a little bit.

Remove the top fillet, feeling happy despite the many mistakes you have made up until now.

Again, save every small piece. You will thank me later. Otherwise, you may have nothing to eat after this ordeal.

Repeat and use masterful knife skills to cut the fish into the remaining fillets. Try not to mess up too much. Mess up a ton anyway. This will become more evident later.

Attempt to remove small pieces of meat from the spine. Remember that every little bit counts. Surprisingly, the spine piece will have the smallest amount of bones, so take advantage of this.

After giving up on the spine because you think it has a lot of bones (oh, you will soon be surprised), dump the spine piece as well as the fish head you removed earlier into a large pot of water to make fish stock. Forget to remove all the gross stuff in the fish head so your fish stock comes out extremely bitter and disgusting. Don’t worry, you didn’t need fish stock anyway. Fish stock is only for real cooks.

Attempt to remove the meat from the next smallest fillet. Quickly realize that every inch of fish contains 2398130298 bones and decide to try and boil one piece of fish in water to see how many bones are actually in it. Also, you are getting hungry, so it may be good to get some food cooking soon.

Take the boiled piece of fish out of the water and try to eat some of it. Discover the millions of tiny bones embedded in each piece of fish, and decide that you are going to have to remove the meat from the bones as planned. Or get impaled by fish bones.

Taste the fish stock you are making and realize you did not take out all the weird stuff in the fish head and that it consequently tastes horrible. Throw it all out and put all of the fish pieces with bones and now-cooked meat onto a plate. Remember there are a billion bones on this plate, so do not eat any of it.

Get incredibly aggressive with your knife and remove as much fish as you can from the remaining raw pieces.

Look at your haul and become terribly depressed at the small amount of usable meat you have recovered. Realize why this was the cheapest fish at the market.

Take all of the cooked pieces with bones attached to them (recovered from the death fish stock) and realize that it is incredibly easy to remove fish meat from bones once the meat is cooked. Proceed to manually take all of the cooked meat off of the bones.

Decide you now can make three iterations of fish. Proceed with iteration one. Take pieces of cooked fish still on the bones and put it in a pot with salt, pepper, herbs, and a bunch of other tasty things to make a stew. Try it and remember why you decided to remove the bones. Your mouth is now full of sharp and pointy things.

Proceed to iteration two. Use the cooked meat you removed from bones and put it in a pan with some chicken stock and a bunch of other tasty herbs and stuff.

Spoon this mixture into small bowls. It tastes so much better than iteration one, and you only get one or two bones per bite! You did a pretty good at manually removing bones from cooked fish, but still not good enough.

Time to bring out the wine. Iteration two wasn’t bad, but you are determined to make something good out of these three hours of work. Drinking some alcohol always makes everything better, so bust it out!

Use the meat with no bones that you had previously put into a Tupperware and add it to a pan with onions. Inhale fumes of deliciousness and hope that iteration three turns out okay.

Add herbs and stuff, but taste the mixture and realize that it doesn’t really taste like much. Scour your kitchen for anything else you can add, and start to get depressed that you don’t have much else to add.