Fish

When last we heard from this intrepid author wanna-be, a blog about micromanagement would be the topic of his next blog. Instead, a word (or several hundred) about fish.

A friend of mine mentioned going to a restaurant the other day and enjoying catfish – while her husband enjoyed cod. His remark about catfish (according to his wife) is that catfish tastes like mud.

I agree. With one exception. I’ll get to that momentarily.

My friend defended catfish by saying that catfish is best prepared by dipping it in buttermilk prior to breading and cooking it. That may be how that one exception was prepared. The only catfish I’ve ever really liked was at a small strip restaurant just around the corner from where I lived in Allen, run by the son of one of the Tuskegee Airmen. It was delicious.

Perhaps my aversion to catfish came about some forty years ago when I was working on an offshore oil rig. I was the northerner on a steel island inhabited mostly by southerners – some of them raised Catholic, meaning that the tradition was that they would eat fish on Fridays. Being southern, the preferred piscatorial delight was catfish. Deep fried catfish in a cornmeal batter. It was… okay, I recall, but there was a mud-flavored overtone which didn’t really appeal to me.

I ate it, in hopes that someday, something better would come along.

The promise that something better would come along came around in the summer of ’82 when the rig I was on was towed from the Gulf of Mexico to a point in the Atlantic Ocean about a hundred miles off Martha’s Vinyard. It was reportedly a prime fishing area, home to a large variety of fish in large numbers – surely enough to supply a drilling rig with something other than southern catfish for a change. That promise was broken. The quartermaster ordered massive amounts of farm-bred catfish to be sent to Massachusetts for the consumption by the mostly southern crew for Friday dinners.

I did manage to treat myself at a decent restaurant in Boston before getting on an airplane to go back home to Houston.

Houston, and by extension, Galveston, was a great place to get decent fish other than catfish. I became particularly fond of Gaido’s in Galveston for the many ways they managed to prepare shrimp. Another favorite was just around the corner from my Aunt and Uncle’s home on the west side of Houston. It was there that I sampled and came to like escargot and Spanish paella.

After moving back to Ohio for a few years, the first wife and I became enamored of a couple of places to indulge in seafood – Mauger’s in Lancaster Ohio, and the Friday night seafood buffet at the Holiday Inn in Parkersburg West Virginia. On the first trip to the Holiday Inn, the first wife declared ahead of time that she would absolutely not eat snail. Period. End of discussion, until she had two or three pastries which she just loved. I told her the truth about the pastries when asked. Yes, they contained snail!

I have to go the next town over from my little corner of the DFW Metromess to get decent seafood (we have nearly two dozen places to purchase tacos here, making purchasing tacos from the outside somewhat illegal in my reckoning). Yes, catfish is still available, but never considered, at least by me, to be a viable alternative to almost any other seafood.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to prepare cod and chips for this afternoon’s lunch.

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