BOB KORNEGAY: Thank goodness every day’s not a fish fry

My friend Trey once likened fish fries to carefree happiness. According to him, for someone going through life oblivious to its trials and tribulations, “Every day’s a fish fry.”

That’s a pretty good analogy as far as it goes.

Yesterday, for example, I caught a mess of bluegills and pan-size bass, went straight home and cleaned and cooked the fish for dinner. That’s rare. In recent years, my “eatin’ fish” have all spent at least a few days in the freezer before winding up on my dinner plate. I’d forgotten how good truly fresh fish really taste. Granted, it was a fish fry for one. But it was wonderful.

Time was, I ate freshly caught fish quite regularly. In the days of my childhood, when the family “deep-freeze” was still a relatively rare appliance, we pretty much ate ‘em as we caught ‘em, giving away those fish we couldn’t immediately cook and consume.

In those treasured days of youth, it was also a favorite pastime to venture forth on overnight fishing/camping excursions with my buddies. A highlight (or lowlight) of these trips was the ritual cooking and eating of our day’s catch on the bank of some favorite lake or stream. My friends and I began this tradition as soon as we were assumed old enough to be trusted alone with fire and flammable cooking liquids.

Through trial and error, we eventually became passable bankside fry cooks. In the process, however, we also created some not-so-pleasant and downright painful recollections.

Once, as Cletus Monroe and I prepared to fry up some 3-finger bream, we remembered having read somewhere that those strike-anywhere matches were good indicators of hot-grease readiness. Just drop in a couple, wait for them to ignite, and you were ready to begin cooking. Of course, as might be expected, we were ignorant of the fact that “a couple” means a couple of matches, not a couple of boxes.

Clete’s eyebrows eventually grew back, though he refused to be seen in public for the next 3 months. The tip was accurate, however. Melted lard hot enough to ignite a match is indeed ready to fry anything, from a 6-inch catfish to a great white shark.

Speaking of 6-inch catfish, my high school chum Virgil once fried a skillet full of little cats, unskinned, on the bank of the Chattahoochee River. Finding it fruitless to skin the fish without pliers (which no member of the party had remembered), he decided we could just as well peel them after cooking. In principle, this was sound thinking.

Unfortunately, not accounting for the taste left behind by several ounces of catfish slime proved a ghastly culinary experience. Washing the fish in stirred-up, muddy river water didn’t help matters. Grit and pebbles don’t do much to counteract the flavor of fried catfish skins.

When we did manage to get most of the preparatory variables in our favor, our boyhood fish fries were often thwarted by relative cooking times. When we guessed right, our main dish emerged from the hot grease perfectly between barely dead and burned to a crisp. If dame fortune was not smiling upon us, we often dined on catfish or bream sushi or else little charred morsels that tasted a lot like seared pine knots. Degree 0f doneness varied with the skill of the cook and how much attention was paid to the cooking process. In our case, both of these important fish-frying variables were normally quite minimal.

Once in a great while, though, despite all our shortcomings, somebody would up and get it right. The shoreline meal would emerge from the skillet golden brown, perfectly seasoned, mouthwatering. Justifiably proud, the appointed cook would platter his masterpiece and walk toward his cronies, who sat holding out their empty plates in rapt anticipation. Almost on cue, the chef would then trip and fall, scattering fried fish and accompanying trimmings all over the sandy, muddy, or leaf-littered ground. That or some mangy stray dog would make off with the whole feast while our backs were turned.

Ah, memories!

Makes a fella realize there are a lot of advantages in removing fish from the freezer and cooking them in the safe, sterile confines of the family kitchen. No adventure in it, though. In retrospect it’s downright ho hum. Maybe next time I’ll just dump in a couple boxes of matches.

Anybody know where I can find the strike-anywhere kind these days?