Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [92]
But in the nineteenth century, sheepsheads were popular and often inexpensive. In 1885, twenty-five years after Twain left the river, you could still buy one broiled for thirty-five cents. The 1901 Picayune’s Creole Cook Book called sheepshead “the most to be commended for household use, being susceptible of a far greater variety of modes of preparation” than any other Gulf fish. The fact that it was somewhat less rich than pompano and mackerel was, the writer thought, actually a virtue; it could be used every day “without injury to the stomach.”
Sheepshead did sometimes appear on the city’s best, and most expensive, Creole tables, as when Twain splurged on a ten-dollar “French” dinner (the word “Creole” wasn’t commonly used to describe city cooking until several decades later). His sheepsheads were cooked with mushrooms, which may mean something like the Picayune’s formula for garnishing a sheepshead “baked” on the stovetop with oysters, shrimp, and a tomato-and-mushroom gravy. Or it could have been like the sheepshead à la normande of a man said to know which fish were best in the markets and “the mode in which New Orleans chefs can best cook them”: he poached the fish, then blended the liquid with butter, Calvados, and heavy cream. Sheepsheads were everyday fish, but they could be elevated by the right hand.
Today they’re making a comeback on New Orleans tables, sometimes under the more appetizing name “sea bream” (there’s a lot of wiggle room in the names of fish—twenty years ago you would have ordered Patagonian toothfish instead of Chilean sea bass, slimehead instead of orange roughy). When Pete catches a few sheepsheads in the summer months, Clara is happy enough to sell them at the stall. But unlike croakers, sheepsheads are worth pursuing for their own sake, especially in the autumn, just before the season for small white shrimp closes near Christmas.
“I’ll be coming back in, see the school on the surface, and just change out nets,” Pete says. “The shrimp trawl nets have a real fine mesh, so they push water in front of them. But the fish trawl is way more open, which lets the water pass through and the fish come in. You can get a good haul that way.” It’s nothing like a windfall; sheepsheads are bony fish, yielding as little as a five-to-one cut, meaning that about 20 percent of the fish’s total weight is usable meat. Still, as the year ends, the white shrimp getting smaller and smaller until it takes a hundred to make up a pound, sheepsheads can be a real boon—they’re one more thing that lets the Gericas keep on doing what they’re doing.
Twain loved fish from the lake, bayou, and open Gulf, whether roasted with essence of mushroom or fried crisply and drizzled with browned butter. But the heart of New Orleans, for him, was the river. The river was why the city existed; the river was what carried him there. The fish he loved grew in its wetland nurseries, thriving on the nutrients it brought downstream.
Twain couldn’t know that all that was slowly ending—that the great, muddy conveyor of life could stop.
There is an art in knowing how to fry fish properly. Perhaps there is no other method of cooking which is more commonly used, and no other which is more generally abused. There are few people who really know how to fry fish properly. The following general rule will give
THE SECRET OF GOOD FRYING
The secret of good frying lies in having the lard heated just to the proper point. If the fish is placed in the boiling lard, it is liable to burn quickly without being cooked through and through. If placed simply in the well-heated lard, it absorbs the fat and is delicate and tender and there is no tax upon the digestive organs. Always have sufficient lard in the pan to fry all the fish that is on hand and never add a lump of cold lard to the heated substance. This checks the cooking of the fish and spoils the taste. If the lard spits and crackles, that is no evidence of boiling. It only means that the lard is throwing off drops of moisture that have crept in. Boiling lard is perfectly still until it begins