A Love Affair with Southern Cooking (28 page)
Read A Love Affair with Southern Cooking Online
Authors: Jean Anderson,Jean Anderson
CATFISH
The catfish is a plenty good enough fish for anyone.
—Mark Twain
When I was a little girl, we’d pile into the family Ford on Sunday afternoons and jounce along unpaved back roads raising clouds of red dust. We’d tunnel through thickets of pine, cross fields of broomstraw, and clatter over wooden bridges, most of them one-lane and some of them covered.
I liked the bridges best because there were always people down below fishing in water as red as iron rust—men, women, children, blacks, whites. Most wore overalls and poke bonnets or straw hats. And most used homemade poles made of bamboo.
“They’re after catfish,” my mother explained, adding that she didn’t like them because they tasted like mud (around here they’re still called “mudcats”). Back then you had to catch your own catfish, befriend someone who did, or do without.
Fast-forward fifty years. The other night at Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill I feasted on catfish fingers as delicate as Dover sole. Lightly jacketed in batter, they were flash-fried just until the flesh, lean and white neath a crisp coating, parted at the touch of a fork. Of course this catfish hadn’t been yanked from a muddy river. It had been farm-raised.
Today 94 percent of all U.S. Farm-Raised Catfish comes from the South, principally Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and each year adds more than $4 billion to the coffers of each.
These catfish swim in environmentally controlled, eco-friendly ponds. To fill them, water is pumped from deep underground, passing through filtering alluvial aquifers en route. Fed high-protein pellets compounded of soybean meal (plus a little corn and rice), these catfish reach “harvest size”—1½ pounds—within 18 to 24 months.
Once inspected by the federal Department of Commerce, U.S. Farm-Raised Catfish are processed and packaged in less than half an hour, making them about as fresh as any fish you can buy. They’re also one of the most versatile: Bake them, broil them, fry them, grill them, steam them. Finally, they are nutritious; high in top-quality protein but low in calories and saturated fat, farm-raised catfish are also a moderate source of the omega-3 fatty acids believed to lower blood pressure and along with it the risk of heart disease.
All of which explains why U.S. Farm-Raised Catfish are now the fourth most popular fish in America. Mark Twain would be pleased.
SOUTHERN-FRIED CATFISH
MAKES
4
SERVINGS
I never tasted catfish until I was grown because my Yankee mother turned up her nose at them. To fill this gap in my culinary education, my Mississippi friend Jean Todd Freeman took me to a fish shack near Hattiesburg and treated me to a plate of fried catfish. Mother was wrong. These catfish tasted nothing like mud. They were farm-raised, Jean explained, then added, “what with Mississippi being the unofficial catfish capital of the world.” Not quite true,
but Mississippi is nonetheless a major producer of top-quality catfish. Note:
Make sure the catfish you use are U.S. Farm-Raised; many sold here now come from South Vietnam’s polluted Mekong Delta.
Four 6-ounce catfish fillets (see Note above)
1 cup buttermilk
¼ cup unsifted self-rising flour
¼ cup unsifted stone-ground yellow cornmeal
¼ teaspoon salt
1
/
8
teaspoon black pepper
1
/
8
teaspoon ground hot red pepper (cayenne)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons bacon drippings
- 1.
Arrange the catfish fillets one layer deep in a large, shallow nonreactive baking pan. Pour the buttermilk evenly over the catfish, cover, and refrigerate for several hours, turning the catfish in the buttermilk at half-time. - 2.
When ready to proceed, combine the flour, cornmeal, salt, black pepper, and cayenne in a pie plate. Lift the catfish fillets from the buttermilk, shaking off the excess, then dredge well on both sides in the flour mixture. Again shake off the excess. - 3.
Heat 1 tablespoon each oil and bacon drippings in a heavy 12-inch skillet over moderately high heat for about a minute or until ripples begin to appear on the skillet bottom. Ease in the catfish and fry 4 to 5 minutes on each side or until golden brown, adding the remaining oil and bacon drippings when you turn the fillets. - 4.
Drain the browned catfish on paper toweling, then serve hot with Hush Puppies and Sweet Slaw.
BAKED BLUEFISH OR RED SNAPPER
MAKES
6
SERVINGS
“The blues are running” is a call heard up and down the East Coast and no louder, perhaps, than along North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Our Raleigh next-door neighbors, the Skaales, took me to Nag’s Head for a week of fishing; then only sixteen, I had never held a fishing pole. It was early autumn, the time when bluefish head south from Long Island Sound and points north. The Skaales’s daughter Betty Anne, two years older than I and already an old hand at pier fishing and surf casting, couldn’t wait for me to discover the joys of bluefishing. Only this time we went out in a boat and I got sick. From then on, it was pier fishing for me. That week with the Skaales was my introduction to bluefish, which had a much stronger taste than the haddock my mother always cooked. Betty Anne’s parents were no more southern than my own parents; Eleanor hailed from Boston, Art from Berkeley. If memory serves, Eleanor baked that first batch of bluefish in cream with a few chopped onions: very New England, and delicious despite my earlier bout of seasickness. On subsequent trips to the OBX (Outer Banks), I learned how locals like to prepare whole bluefish—and this recipe with onion, bell pepper, and tomatoes may be the best. Boning a whole
baked bluefish, however, isn’t as neat as peeling a potato, so I’ve substituted fillets. Note:
Choose a baking dish attractive enough to go from oven to table; no point in trying to transfer fragile baked fish to a heated platter.
2 pounds bluefish or red snapper fillets
2 tablespoons bacon drippings, butter, or vegetable oil
1 small yellow onion, coarsely chopped
1 small green bell pepper, cored, seeded, and coarsely chopped
1 small celery rib, trimmed and finely diced
1 small garlic clove, finely chopped
1 large whole bay leaf
1 teaspoon dried leaf basil, crumbled
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
One 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes with their liquid
1 tablespoon tomato ketchup
½ teaspoon salt, or to taste
¼ teaspoon black pepper, or to taste
¼ teaspoon hot red pepper sauce, or to taste
¼ cup coarsely chopped parsley
- 1.
Preheat the oven to 375° F. Divide the bluefish fillets into 6 pieces of equal size and set aside. - 2.
Heat the drippings in a large, heavy skillet over moderately high heat for about 1 minute or until ripples appear on the skillet bottom. Add the onion, bell pepper, celery, garlic, bay leaf, and basil and cook for 5 to 8 minutes, stirring often, or until limp and lightly browned. - 3.
Sprinkle the flour evenly over the mixture and cook and stir for about a minute. Add the tomatoes and their liquid, the ketchup, salt, pepper, and red pepper sauce and cook, stirring constantly, for about 3 minutes or until the mixture thickens and boils. Taste the sauce for salt, pepper, and red pepper sauce and adjust as needed. Discard the bay leaf. - 4.
Spread half the sauce over the bottom of an ungreased 13 × 9 × 2-inch baking dish, arrange the fish in the sauce, then cover with the remaining sauce. - 5.
Slide onto the middle oven shelf and bake uncovered for 20 to 25 minutes or until the fish almost flakes at the touch of a fork. - 6.
Sprinkle the parsley evenly over all and serve directly from the baking dish. Accompany with fluffy boiled rice and a crisp green salad.
Heirloom Recipe
SUN-DRIED HERRING
Clean and fillet fish without separating fish. Pepper heavily and salt as for frying. Pin to clothesline and dry out in the late evening, overnight and until noon the next day. Keep under refrigeration or freeze. These fish may either be broiled or pan fried.
—
Roanoke Island Cook Book
, compiled by members and friends of the Manteo Woman’s Club, Manteo, North Carolina
Recipe contributed by Mrs. Grizell Fearing
HERRING RUNS ON THE ROANOKE
“Do you know about the Cypress Grill near Jamesville?” David Perry, editor-in-chief of the University of North Carolina Press, e-mailed me when he heard I was writing a southern cookbook. “It’s only open during the annual herring run and serves herring right out of the Roanoke River, a practice that has been going on since Colonial times.”
I’d read about Cypress Grill in
Gourmet, The Smithsonian,
and elsewhere. But until recently, I’d never made the two-hour drive east from Chapel Hill to feast on herring right out of the latte-colored Roanoke, which eddies seaward less than 100 feet from the Grill’s front door.
A friend and I drove down early one Saturday in late March to beat the lunch crowd and arrived an hour before the place opened. No problem. We sat at a picnic table, watched speedboats zip up and down the river, and talked to seventy-three-year-old Leslie Gardner, who’s owned Cypress Grill for more than thirty years (it opened in 1936 as a clubhouse for local fishermen).
“Those ain’t commercial fishermen,” Gardner said, indicating two men laying a herring drift (net) from a flat-bottomed metal skiff midriver. “Ain’t no commercial fishing on the Roanoke nowadays.” With the Roanoke’s herring supplies depleted, North Carolina banned commercial fishing on the river in 1995. Even sport fishermen are allowed only a dozen herring a day.
The herring now served at Cypress Grill, a weathered clapboard shack open only from mid-January till May, now comes from the Chowan River, “over Edenton way.” A government placard posted inside the Grill’s front door lists the restrictions on herring fishing, and just beyond it, there’s an anti-moratorium petition for diners to sign. Plenty do.
Fish shacks once lined the Roanoke’s south bank around Jamesville. Today Cypress Grill is the only one where you can fill up on batter-fried herring, flounder, oysters, clams, shrimp, sweet slaw, hush puppies, your choice of homemade pie (chocolate, lemon meringue, coconut, or pecan), plus all the iced tea you can drink.
The front room is the place to eat. We snared the window booth where we could not only see the river action but also survey the room: tables draped with blue-and-white-checked oilcloth, a wall-to-wall photo gallery chronicling the glory days of Jamesville’s herring industry, Cypress Grill T-shirts for sale tacked to a lattice room divider, a three-generation family (toddler to granny) bowing their heads to say grace.
We ordered the herring, of course. But we had no idea how to eat it. Each fish was about six inches long and fried to a crisp—“cremated,” the locals call it. Amused, the waitress came over to help. “Do you mind if I touch your food?” I shook my head. She parted the fish down the middle with her hands, cautioned me to avoid the backbone, then told me to eat the rest, bones and all. “They’re fried hard,” she explained. I bit into a piece as crunchy as a potato chip.
Once again the waitress intervened. “It’s better if you sprinkle it with vinegar. And this,” she
added, sliding a chile-stuffed bottle of vinegar across the table, “is the Jamesville way.” Some folks, she said, like barbecue sauce on their herring, others prefer Texas Pete. I stuck with plain vinegar. It did improve the flavor of the herring just as it does that of slow-cooked collards.
Cypress Grill’s hush puppies, unlike the crispy brown ones I knew, were chewy and yellow and tasted of stone-ground cornmeal—no sugar, no onion. I liked them, but better still was the sweet slaw that accompanied my mountainous platter of fried herring, flounder, and shrimp.
When it came to dessert, I succumbed to the chocolate pie (dark and delicious!) and my friend to the coconut (an excruciatingly sweet chess pie with a crunch of coconut on top).
And what did our herring feast cost? Less than twenty-five dollars!
SKILLET TROUT WITH PARSLEY-PECAN PESTO
MAKES
4
SERVINGS
Trout swim the quicksilver streams of the Great Smokies and Blue Ridge and I love them fresh-caught, dredged in stone-ground cornmeal, and fried the southern way. Still I aimed for something a little more unusual by churning pecans, a key southern crop, into a sauce. It’s a good combo.
Parsley-Pecan Pesto
11
/
3
cups firmly packed Italian parsley leaves
½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1
/
3
cup very lightly toasted pecans (5 to 7 minutes in a 350° F. oven)
1 large garlic clove, peeled
1
/
3
cup fruity olive oil
Trout
½ cup stone-ground cornmeal
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon ground hot red pepper (cayenne)
Four 6-ounce trout fillets
2 to 4 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 1.
For the pesto: Churn the parsley, Parmesan, pecans, and garlic in a food processor for about 30 seconds or until very finely chopped. With the motor running, drizzle the olive oil down the feed tube and continue processing for 15 to 20 seconds until well blended, scraping the work bowl with a rubber spatula at half-time. - 2.
For the trout: Mix the cornmeal, salt, black pepper, and cayenne in a pie plate, then dredge the trout fillets well on both sides in the mixture. Shake off the excess. - 3.
Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a heavy 12-inch skillet over moderately high heat for 1 to 1½ minutes or until ripples appear on the skillet bottom. Ease in the trout fillets and fry 4 to 5 minutes on each side or until golden brown, adding more oil if needed. - 4.
Spoon
1
/
3
cup of the pesto over the trout fillets, dividing evenly. Cover and cook 1 to 2 minutes more or just until the pesto is heated through. - 5.
Arrange the trout on four heated dinner plates and serve. Pass the remaining pesto separately.