Tuesday, August 26, 2003

See Food

The tastiest catfish I ever consumed comes back in my memory (disturbingly long ago): Eric, his parents and I out beside Lake Cachuma, the central coast ranges - a cleft in dry mountains, improbably drowned; we went with a sailboat, pottered around a bit, fiddled with fishing but never caught anything, stayed at a campsite and cooked using propane - everything tasted great, even the cereal floating in powdermilk…

But speaking objectively, nothing came close to the fabulous catfish that other folk caught.  You could see them offloading their excess and extras, just dumping them onto a compost of flesh: there were hundreds of catfish decaying inertly, banished like filth as superfluous kill… but some they kept living in old plastic buckets and brought them, still gasping, to wide wooden boards that were rutted and gashed from discourteous use: So you take you a catfish alive on the plank and a long skinny shank of a knife like a pigsticker; hold him still and fair with one hand, grab your sticker with the other, drive that knifepoint through his skull and pin his head right to the board - then you can cut a collar for him; take a second knife and slice around his throat and down his sides (but here’s the thing: he isn’t dead - his eyes are goggling, mouth gaping) You’ll need to hold his tail still, and then you get some broad-nose pliers - catfish skin is more like leather, too much work to skin’em later - just grab some skin and peel him naked (fish flesh stripped and stippled red, and fishface now ironically enmasked with skin that grew in place) it makes its little moo-face, looks around at all us people (breathing air and moving freely); then you cut the dorsal line - that’s up his backbone - finally you can fillet him (slice the living bleeding muscles off his water-craving ribs, and even so his eyes remain undimmed, he watches us as we dissect him) two enormous slices later, drop the tail - he can’t move it, gots no muscles; pull the sticker from his head and slip his spine and guts and face ( - still asking me that awful question) down into a pit of scraps (the offal, filth, that howling mouth, insulted remnants of a catfish)...

Walk away from all the cutting, get the meat back to my campstove, fry it with a little onion - best I’ve tasted anywhere, and memories to last a lifetime…