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or two years before Katrina, before the storm or after the storm, pre-K or post-K. It’s the city’s B.C. and A.D., and everyone has personal stories of dread, flight, and loss. But Clara’s is among the most hair-raising I hear: She was in her East New Orleans home near Bayou Sauvage, waiting out the storm with her husband and eighty-one-year-old mother-in-law, when the house came apart around them. “The roof went, and I was thinking, Well, that’s it,” she says with a laugh. “Then the walls went down. Then we were in the water.” Pete managed to get into his skiff and came to pull his mother and Clara out. But Clara, a large woman who cheerfully describes herself as being in terrible shape, couldn’t get in until a floating chair gave her enough leverage to claw her way over the gunwale. As they rowed to higher ground, they were lucky enough to find their household safe floating by.

Bayou Sauvage, Clara says, is paradise—home to egrets, alligators, raccoons, and otters, all within the New Orleans city limits. But it’s also close to the MRGO, or Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet. The MRGO (often pronounced “Mr. Go”) is a fantastically wrongheaded Army Corps of Engineers shortcut to the Gulf; fifty feet wide when first dug, the canal later eroded to two hundred feet across, swallowing and killing tens of thousands of acres of marsh. During Katrina the storm surge up the MRGO was a big reason that the levees failed (it’s since been sealed off, closing one backdoor to the city). And at the same moment that they were being flooded from their home, Pete and Clara’s three boats were sinking. It was a year before Pete got back on the water, and even then it was on the boats of generous friends.

One great thing about small shrimpers like the Gericas is that they can sell a single fish at market. Far less goes to waste than with massive factory trawlers, which can have ten-thousand-horsepower engines and are interested in nothing but shrimp. In unregulated fisheries such boats can end up discarding as much as fifteen times as many pounds of bycatch as they do shrimp. And put aside the clinical word “bycatch” for a moment—we’re talking about rockfish, red snapper, sea horses, turtles, whatever life the fine-meshed nets sweep up. Just thinking about trading fifteen pounds of dead ocean life for a pound of shrimp gives me a migraine, and makes the small, fresh black drum fillets that Clara sells seem both decently human-scaled and even more appealing.

Using bycatch instead of tossing it over the side is one reason that Clara knows the taste of croaker as well as she does (Poppy Tooker, author of the Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook, told me that locals most often use the fish for cat food). “Oh, that is excellent. It’s bony, but real sweet,” Clara says. She loves the fillets, which even people who eat croaker rarely taste—it’s too small and bony for most people to bother cutting off the meat before eating. But Clara’s gotten great at boning out fish. “Not by choice,” she says.

Tooker’s certainly right that croakers are almost determinedly modest. In 2004 a political fight erupted in Matagorda, Texas, over using croakers as trout bait; some guides worried that croakers made such appealing bait that the speckled trout population would be decimated. And croakers are less often sought for their own sake than used to substitute for more elevated fish, as when Rima and Richard Collin’s The New Orleans Cookbook suggests, a bit ironically, that they make a decent replacement for speckled trout. When you do see a croaker-specific recipe, it invariably calls for frying, going all the way back to Lafcadio Hearn’s 1885 Creole Cook Book; fried fish is terrific—done well, it’s as good a meal as there is. But frying isn’t usually the go-to cooking method for expensive or upscale species.

A platter of small fried croakers makes a delicious, crunchy meal; the Collins suggest frying the center bones and tail as an extra delicacy. Hearn is frustratingly vague, saying only to serve with “any sauce or catsup desired,” but was probably thinking of one of