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At
my house, we eat farm-raised catfish at least once a week and sometimes more often than that. I even eat it for breakfast on occasion with grits and a cold glass of milk. After all, where I’m from, it’s the other white meat.
There was a guy back home named Feet (we have some strange nicknames) who worked for a fish seining business. This particular company seined for some of the biggest catfish producers in the county and everywhere they worked, the crew was offered fish to carry home.
We’d go by to visit Feet with produce from our garden, and share stories in his cozy little tarpaper shotgun shack he’d built back in the woods. He always insisted that we stay for a meal (we tried to plan our visits near supper time). He didn’t have electricity for a cook stove and during the summer when it was too hot to burn the wood stove, he’d tote a small bottle of propane in every couple of weeks to cook with out on the screened-in porch.
Feet knew only one way to cook and that was to fry, and he fried only in lard. If you’ve never had anything cooked in lard, in my opinion, you’re missing out on part of our Southern heritage. He’d take the fish out of the hot oil and place it directly on our plates without straining it or blotting it on paper like a lot of us do. You had to eat it as soon as it got cool enough to put in your mouth or the lard would coagulate and form a film on your tongue that felt like pasty fur. We tried to remember to stop by the general store and pick up a fresh bucket of lard on our way to Feet’s house because he used the same oil over and over again cooking everything from fish, to chicken and squirrel, to fried green tomatoes and mashed cushaw until his grease would eventually turn the color of coffee.
Then there was a little diner that most folks had sense enough to avoid after the sun went down (we were regulars). This place had the best hamburgers, gumbo, chili and chicken stew of anyone around, but their specialty was something called gar balls and gravy. Best I can figure is they mixed alligator gar meat with some flour, a little onion, salt and lots of powdered red pepper and rolled the mixture into meatballs. This was added to a roux that made the whole mix look much like chicken and dumplings. It was served with a beverage of choice and a loaf of light bread. This concoction was so hot that your eyes watered and your nose ran as you gingerly chewed until your mouth pretty much went numb. “All you can eat” is how it was sold and about every five minutes someone would come around with a big bucket and ladle more of the goo into your bowl.
Another river fish I had the good fortune to eat on occasion was buffalo or what some people called a ‘gourd head.’ I worked at a cotton gin on and off during my adolescence and into adulthood. Over that fifteen-year stretch, there was a lady named Miss Mary Reed who sold us our meals both during the day and night shifts and it was never store bought food.
Occasionally she would cook coon, snapping turtle, rabbit or squirrel but usually it was fish and nearly always buffalo fish. Her sons would go down to the slough during the dry season and muddy up the trapped backwater. Buffalo would float to the top for easy pickings. Some would weigh twenty-five pounds or more. With that quantity of meat, she plugged in and filled up one chest type freezer and usually used a second upright freezer she kept in her work shed.
Two of her sons would bring in big banana boxes filled with three section Chinet paper plates covered in foil. The smell of hot sauce and mustard that the fish was smothered in would fill the crisp fall air. Under the foil was a piece of fish steak an inch thick and as big around as the plate, in the center of the plate was a pile of limp, greasy home cut potato slices topped with a huge slice of onion and a long dill pickle slice on one side. Talk about a herd of hungry hogs running to a feed trough! Unlike smaller fishes’ bones that you might get lodged in your throat, buffalo bones were 4-6 inches long and a quarter inch thick…you could eat it almost like you eat pork ribs!
Not long ago, several of us from AFC attended a Co-op store’s horse owner meeting. We were served fried catfish (it’s not like going to a cattle meeting where you expect beef). Anyway, we knew something was special about this place when we were served fried fish not in filets or whole but cut in steaks that were as big around as my upper arm. I had to explain to a co-worker what a fish steak was since she had never seen such a thing. Turns out that the owner of the restaurant’s husband was a commercial fisherman who had caught these monsters on a trotline in the very river my table overlooked. The taste wasn’t nearly as ‘clean’ as pond raised fish but that didn’t matter right then. For a few minutes I went back to a simpler time to visit again with country people I knew who could turn river fish, that most anglers would throw back, into a culinary memory that I will savor forever. |
