A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [96]
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