Hilsa — ilish (ইলিশ) in Bengali — is the rich, oily, intensely aromatic flesh of Tenualosa ilisha, a large anadromous shad of the herring family that runs up the rivers of the Bay of Bengal to spawn. Silvery and deep-bodied, it is arguably the most culturally important fish of the Indian subcontinent — the "king of fish" of Bengal, a GI-tagged icon of Bangladesh and its national fish — prized for a soft, fat-marbled, almost buttery meat and a distinctive nutty, marine aroma, and eaten with a reverence unmatched by any other fish in the region despite a notorious lattice of fine intramuscular bones.