Two of us in my current shared household of four men are inveterate salmon eaters—great fans of Aldi’s economical wild caught salmon with the skin on, which we bake or fry in large batches for the week. It is a great grace that the others in our home who are not partakers do not complain. Salmon frying indoors is legitimately a cause for disharmony. Did I mention we leave the skin on, creating what one of the said gracious roommates just noted “leaves residuals for days.” Well, they don’t complain much!
And so it was somewhat of a change-up today when I set into my cast iron frying pan thick fillets of firm-fleshed, skinless cod, procured from Aldi’s somewhat more sophisticated step-sibling Trader Joe’s (it’s a complicated story). Today I kept things simple and added butter and oregano, salt and pepper. I even left off the lemon which sometimes wants to take over the show.
And the scent profile that emanated from that pan—perhaps having extra clarity for being free of the pungent smell of frying fish oils—took me to an unexpected place, to the kitchen in 128 Cooper Street in a rather depressed part of East Alton, Illinois in the 80’s. There, in that kitchen of our Grandma’s house with its close cropped brown carpet following the death of our mother a few years earlier, we Das boys along with our father began to cobble together our cooking skills through trial and error. We had a gas range and a huge, classic J. C. Penney microwave which came with its own cookbook, which I still have on the shelf in my kitchen today, with the pages of the recipes we used most often having the most stains.
Did you know you can bake a chicken in a microwave? But you have to sort of baste on a mixture of Kitchen Bouquet and butter, which creates the rather alarming effect of a spray tan. Oriental pork and cabbage was our favorite from the book, but we would go on to create a cumin chicken microwave dish that was excellent and then graduate to the stove to perfect Pakistani dishes and to bake. But the dish that I was reminded of making in that kitchen today was one that we used to make even when my mother was alive, baked bluegill.
It would be hard to exaggerate how much I loved to go fishing when I was young. In my most distant memories—which are perhaps embroidered through the retelling of tales—I remember Grandpa Bodenbach’s fishing trips with his Wheatie balls for bait, the recipe for which also involved mashed bananas and perhaps some blood from a meat package*. These bait balls were mashed on onto a treble hook and cast far into the wide Ohio River to rest on the bottom until a fish scooped one up and began the swooping, plunging dance of line and reel, of man and fish. But the poetry of motion and stillness that is often associated with trout fishing this was not—this was fishing for food, and even the carp which are considered junk fish were filleted and deveined and and the bones scored before being pressure cooked in Mason jars to appear as ghostly neighbors to the canned green beans and tomato juice and pickles in the light of a pull-chain, naked lightbulb in the basement.
Even when we lived in Pakistan where my father is from, he would find a day in his busy schedule as a college president to answer my incessant pleas by taking us out to the head water works on the Chenab River where we fished various side pools. It is from this area if one is fortunate that one can see the mountains in Indian controlled Jammu. Later in the nineties, again dad would show his love for my love of fishing, his love for me, by having a large pond built on our 5 acre property in Illinois by having a creek dammed up by a bulldozer at considerable expense.
But in the eighties the luxury of a family farm pond was still some years away and fishing for us mainly involved visiting the farm ponds of friends and coming home with a mess of bluegill, and a catfish or two if we were lucky. Then I would gut and scale the bluegill on a fish shaped board, score their tiny bodies and add the butter and oregano and salt and lay them out on a cookie sheet to bake.
I will put the texture and taste of a bluegill up against any game fish, though they are often finished all too soon with the delicate backbones interlacing as they pile up. And one secret of this recipe that I learned then and that I experienced again today, is that as good as the fish itself may be, really its principle job is to be a vector for the drippings! I exaggerate, but really you will want to spoon them up for basting the fish while cooking and then at the end you will want to spoon them up to finish every last bit of them.
It may seem kitschy and sentimental to dwell upon the image of a child and the adult who took them fishing, but perhaps even greater than my memories of my father and grandfather in regard to fishing, is how thoughts of fishing and bluegill and farm ponds evoked by my cod cooking today reminded me of my Uncle Virgil, one of my mother’s older brothers. He is inextricably linked with it all, especially because for a time while he and my dear Aunt Verdna were estranged, he lived with us in our grandmother’s house and for a time in a ramshackle little cottage on the farm where we fished most often and where at least on one occasion we cooked the fish we caught.
There on the farm Uncle Virg had a John boat chained up to a tree that we would paddle around the Meeks’ pond which had a wide shallow area with hollowed out nests where the bluegill spawned and shady coves where the trees overhung the water and one might catch a rock bass. There one year a snapping turtle which had the circumference of a manhole cover floated up to our boat without any fear to stretch out its horny head to look at us. Another year a 17 year cicada brood emerged from the ground and covered all the tree trunks. A better bait for small game fish may not exist than a wriggling, brightly colored cicada. That day I caught a sleek channel catfish just yards from the shore.
It perhaps may seem in poor taste to casually mention an uncle’s estrangement from your aunt in an essay ostensibly about fishing. But that was the context in which my young adult knowledge of my Uncle Virgil began, and in that sense it is part of my own story. Perhaps always a bit rough around the edges, in those years he was rather extra gruff. But even in what must have been incredibly hard times for him, difficult far beyond my ken, he would still take us fishing in the summer and hunting in the winter and even on the occasional canoe float trip in the Ozarks. And yet what I remember about him most was his tireless service for other people—of his driving his pickup with the ramshackle wooden planks surrounding the bed to St. Louis to bring back a heaping pile of bread for the Operation Blessing food pantry. And though the estrangement was real enough, in some ways it was a strange one indeed as each summer he planted a garden at our grandma’s house and an even larger one at his own house where my aunt lived where he also kept up with all the mowing.
I am also bold to recall my aunt and uncle’s business here because its resolution is one of the moments in my own life where I can most clearly say “God did this.” I still remember where I was when I was told that they were reconciled. And in the coming decades as they rejoined their lives together and the grandchildren increased in number, there was a mellowing in my uncle with much of the gruffness melting away.
And in the next few decades, a great friendship would develop between him and my father as he would come to help work on the grounds of our new house, doing strenuous tasks together including chainsawing and burning large piles of trees (yes, on one occasion the fire department was obliged to pay us a visit) and manually creating a retaining wall out of railroad ties, while they both aged from their 60s into their 70s. Often times I would work with them or head inside a little early to cook them lunch, those culinary experiments on Cooper Street having done their work. And on a few occasions when the day’s work was done Uncle Virgil would grab a rod from his truck and I would grab mine and we would fish in our own farm pond in the twilight.
*Correction-I don’t know that Wheatie ball involved any mashed bananas. The father of a friend used bait that was made from bananas and wheat germ, and I think I conflated the two.
