There is a week in April when the kohada stops being a winter fish and becomes a spring one, and nobody announces it. You find out because the cure you have run for four months suddenly finishes a day early.
Kohada is gizzard shad, and it is the fish an Edomae counter is judged on, because it cannot be bought into being good. It arrives small and oily and it has to be scaled, filleted, salted, rinsed and then laid in rice vinegar, and every one of those stages moves with the weather. Eight days in salt is the number we give people. The truth is that eight days is what it takes in February in a room at eighteen degrees, and in April, with the windows open and the humidity climbing off the Saronic, it is closer to six.
What changes is not the fish so much as the water in it. A colder fish holds its salt longer and gives it up slower. When the sea warms the flesh softens by a degree you can feel with a thumb, and if you hold to the calendar instead of the thumb you get a fish that has gone slightly chalky at the edge and lost the line between the salt and the vinegar.
You do not cure to a schedule. You cure to a fish.
So in the second week of April we start checking a day early, and we keep checking, and for about ten days the counter gets a kohada that is a little brighter and a little less firm than the one it had in March. Regulars notice. Markos noticed in 2023 before we said anything, which is how we knew we had been right to move.
By May it settles into its summer rhythm and stays there until the water cools again in November, when the whole thing runs in reverse and the cure lengthens back out towards eight days.