The forecast calls for snow in Manhattan today, but I'm not fazed. I know that spring is coming to New York. How, you ask? Because I passed by Citarella on my way to work today, and there are two signs in the window: the first reads "Boned Shad", and the second reads "Shad Roe". Pennsylvania can keep its groundhog; for inhabitants of the Hudson River Valley there's no better barometer of the onset of spring than the beginning of the shad run.

The Hudson River was once a feast of marine delicacies: oysters as big as your fist, mussels, eels, and myriad species of fish. For over a hundred years, though, the ecological stresses of marine shipping and pollution coming downriver from Albany and its environs -- particularly the carcinogenic PCBs spewing from General Electric plants along the river -- have either wiped out the native species or rendered them unsafe for human consumption. Now the mighty shad, essentially a giant herring, is all we have left. Because it spends almost its entire life cycle in the ocean, coming upriver only to spawn, it remains thankfully untainted by the poisonous Hudson waters, and we may still eat of its flesh.

That is, if we can get to its flesh. Aside from the potentially deadly blowfish known to well-heeled sushi daredevils as fugu, a whole shad may be the most difficult fish in the world to clean. A Native American legend tells of a disgruntled porcupine, unhappy with his spiny existence, who complained to the god Manitou and asked to be changed into something else. The god supposedly turned the ungrateful porcupine inside out and tossed him into the river: he became the first shad. Where most fish have one row of pin bones, shad have three. And some of the shad's pin bones branch out into Y-shapes. Expert fishmongers, with years of experience and an intimate knowledge of the fish's anatomy, still require several minutes to fillet a whole shad. The best the average home cook can aspire to is an hour's toil for bone-studded shad tartare.

That's OK though, because the real prize of the shad is not the meat, it's the roe. A shad roe sac is a blood-red pod of egg grains, ranging in size from a baby fingerling potato to a kirby cucumber. It is usually sautéed, pan-fried, or occassionally broiled, whole. Classic preparations include shad roe with bacon and onions, or shad roe scrambled eggs.

Shad are indigenous to the eastern seaboard, and although they were successfully introduced to the Pacific Northwest a century ago, Hudson River shad are still the most prized. The shad run, the annual migration of the fish upriver to spawn, usually begins in mid-March and ends around June 1. The largest and fattest shad, named "lilacs" for the shade of their scales, don't usually make it upriver until the end of the run, so it's worth waiting until a little later in the season for a better catch. The state authorities forbid fishing for shad between Friday morning and Sunday morning during the run, to prevent depletion of the spawning beds, so the freshest fish is probably to be had during the week as opposed to the weekends. I'm not too anxious to taste the first shad of the season, but you can be sure there'll be a shad recipe on this site in the weeks to come. Then you'll know for sure that spring is really here.