Crowned Jack

As this food blog is already four days old, I figure it's about time I introduce you to my mother. When it comes to food, I believe mothers are a major influence, their home cooking pivotal in shaping the palate and their kitchen-competence an undiscovered dominant allele. Plus, all the best chefs are mama's boys*. You can expect to hear from me all sorts of recipes that originated with my mother and she knows a lot about weird ingredients; she’s really just a Costco-sized bag of food ideas. All that and she knows how to fillet a fish! She even has a really funny story about teaching someone to do it. Because I care about you, my tiny but presumably rapidly-expanding readership, I asked her to type it out for us. Here it is, fresh from Manitoba:

“Spring reminds me of the time I taught my friend Billy from Montreal how to fillet a fish.

Billy and I shared a duplex in the teachers' housing at Grand Rapids in Manitoba. He and his wife had gamely left Montreal to teach in the north here for an adventure and to save some money. Billy liked to fit in with the local guys and he was popular because he liked a joke even if it was on him. When spring fishing was about to start, he was getting invitations to join in the fun, but he wasn't accepting any. One day he came to my side of the house to explain why.

Billy the City Boy had never touched a fish, and he feared the hallmark northern teasing if he were to catch one and not be able to perform. He could laugh even if he was the butt of a joke, but this prospect was too much. He couldn't ask one of the guys. Of course I said I would help him. It's not hard to fillet a fish. My dad taught me when I was a kid. All Billy had to do was bring me a fish.

Pretty soon he was at my door beaming because someone had given him a big jackfish. It was Saturday morning and he had the jackfish in a plastic bag. He spilled it, thrashing, into my kitchen sink. “Holy crow!” I yelped, “This is a huge fish. It should really be baked, not filleted.” The fish could not have laid flat in the sink even if had been fully dead. The head went up one side and the tail up the other. I said, “Billy, let's hit it on the head, have a drink and wait for it to calm down.” So I poured us each a Crown Royal and Coke and we sat and waited. Every time we finished a drink we hit it again but we were pretty drunk by time the fish was merely twitching.

I pulled out my filleting knife and we lay the huge thing on the table with lots of paper and room to spare, since it still moved quite a bit. Billy was squeamish about this but the worst part was actually getting a firm hold on it long enough to make the cuts. I have pretty small hands and jackfish are slimy. Anyway, I was able to do the job and he quickly grasped the angles. I coached him to feel the backbone with the knife edge, and then to feel the skin against the flesh on the other side of the fillet. I told him to go slow with his first few and feel the fish under the knife so he would get a nice fat fillet. Otherwise he would still get the razz from the guys.

Billy was very, very happy and quite pissed when it was done. The next day he reported that he had gone fishing with some local guys and done some filleting. Nobody laughed at him.”

The moral of this story is that it is great thing to know how to fillet a fish. (This may shock you, but I still need to learn; I am a delicate sort of person and, though I do have plans to finally make my mother proud, it will take me a quantity of Crown Royal I’m still saving up to buy.) The fact that the victim in the story here is a jackfish specifically is of no great consequence, but because they are such interesting creatures, I’m going to tell you some of their secrets (learned, of course, from my mom).

Jackfish, or Northern Pike, is a delicious medium-firm white fish present in the lakes of Manitoba. Where my mother grew up, in a town of only several hundred people called Bissett, folks referred to it as ‘snake’. This is because jackfish are terribly slimy (and although snakes aren’t, they are thought to be) and very difficult to handle. For this reason, jackfish aren’t as popular as their taste alone might have made them and they aren’t available commercially. In Manitoba, even fishermen who know jackfish are tasty are apt to throw them back if there are pickerel (a.k.a ‘walleye’), sauger, or perch biting alongside them. This is because, as well as being tough to grip, jackfish are impossibly hard to clean. First, like sharks, they often have unappetizing surprises lurking in their bellies, like shoelaces, or intact dead mice. Second, jackfish flesh is possessed of dreaded Y-shaped bones, which make filleting them a terrific challenge even once the carcass stops flapping. So, in my mother’s experience, many a jackfish is caught just to be bonked on the head and left to float for the seagulls, with or without its eyes in their sockets, as these may be plucked out and used for bait.

If I haven’t yet ruined your appetite, I’ll pass on the news about how to eat a jackfish, should you ever come across one. (Note that jackfish are indeed so unpopular that even I, hailing from Winnipeg, have never tasted one, so it isn’t likely you will either; read on nonetheless, as you are better safe than sorry.)

Number one, you want to prepare a jackfish just like pickerel† or sole, or any other white fish with a lot of bones. That is, you want to pan fry it or boil it, preferably not bake it whole, because it’s safer to de-bone it before it’s cooked. (For those of you who have never heard of boiling white fish, this method is rumored to lend it the texture of lobster. This I heard not from my mother, but from a fellow I met at a dinner party in Toronto who reported learning the technique from some old guys, First Nations, again in Manitoba.)

My mother cautions strenuously against eating jackfish fast, as no matter how diligently the chef may have removed the bones, some of those Y-shaped devils are bound to have been missed, and if you get one caught in your throat, in the words of my own mother, “you’re fucked”. By this she means to say that a Y-shaped bone is uniquely tricky to remove from the throat. Instead of simply swallowing a piece of dry bread (which, legend has it, will help pass down the gullet a bone from a simpler, less fascinating fish such as snapper), you may have to go the hospital to dislodge a Y-bone. Word to the wise.

No matter how you prepare a jackfish, or any other white fish, including the anonymous, grilled, publicly available one pictured above, my mother advises “Let loose with the butter.” Here, proving the DNA basis of culinary convictions, I have to agree. White fish like cod, sole, haddock, and halibut is naturally free of fat and it needs it.

And if my approval means that much to you, have a Crown and Coke too.

*Here, I am referring to both men and women chefs, the best among them who praise their mothers’ influence, as ‘mama’s boys’. I find this preferable to changing the phrase to ‘mama’s boys and girls’. Rest assured I can also be counted on to call men who really like their dads ‘daddy’s girls’. In the words of the Kinks, girls will be boys and boys will be girls. It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world. (Except for Lola).

†This is indeed the second time I’m mentioning pickerel without explaining its wonders. I promise to enlighten you at the first opportunity, which should coincide with my first chance to eat it this season.