A Fishy Culinary Tradition

 

Whose idea was it to add breading or batter to fish? Fish is delicious when fried or seared, rich in flavour and texture. Breading it just masks the flavour and makes the whole dish feel much heavier than it should. 

Maybe I'm spoiled. Mom and Dad used to catch fresh fish from the pristine lakes of northern Manitoba and clean and fry the fillets right at the campground. The pickerel and trout they prepared in those days remains my favourite meal of all time. All fish since has paled in comparison. 

Even so, I can still enjoy fish if it's not wrapped in a casing of fried lard and butter. 

Fish: better without the batter. 

It Was X Number of Years Ago Today

Here's my brother Sean some decades-odd years ago, tuckered out in the boat after an afternoon of fishing near Leaf Rapids, Manitoba. Note his yellow lifejacket--safety first! One of Sean's claims to fame is this: he was the seventh baby born in Leaf Rapids. 

Happy Birthday, Sean, and here's to many more. 

On the Rocks

Here I am sometime in the early  1970s watching my maternal grandfather fish in a Manitoba lake. We seem oblivious to the fallen birch between us. 

Stop Battering Fish

I know it's traditional to batter fish, especially for the fish & chips staple, but honestly, fish is so much better without the batter. Earl has spoken! 

Earl of Green Gables, Day Seven: Peggy's Cove and Lunenburg

The Pocket Fisherman

In the 1970s, when the summers came, we fished. It was a short drive from Leaf Rapids to the Swanee River campground, where we parked the camper (or the tent trailer, in the early years) and set off in the canoe or the motorboat to cast our lines into the rivers or lakes. 

Mom and Dad did most of the casting. I usually read a book, though from time to time they coaxed me into working with rod and reel. Out of all those summers (was it really only seven or eight of them before we came to Alberta?), I caught perhaps three fish, all of them jackfish, all thrown back into the water because they were too hard to clean. I never caught a pickerel or a perch, the tastiest fish, but luckily Mom and Dad made up the deficit. 

We had at least one Pocket Fisherman, and I remember being fascinated by its design. To my surprise, you can still buy a Pocket Fisherman today. I find that comforting. 

1987 Fish Haiku

Blurry and blue fish
Twitching his way to freedom
At the toilet's bottom

No Unsharp Mask Can Save Thee

While scanning the family collection of negatives, I came across an entire roll of film shot out of focus. I have no idea how this could happen. And it's a shame, because the photos capture an early 1980s trip back to Cranberry Portage. I tried re-scanning the roll to see if it was some weird scanner configuration problem, but no dice. And the blur is so bad that tools like unsharp mask can't fix it.

Quelle dommage, as they say in France! 

National Aboriginal Day

Today is National Aboriginal Day in Canada, but despite growing up in northern Manitoba I feel woefully unqualified to speak to the complex issues surrounding the relationship between Canada's indigenous peoples and the European settlers from which I descend. My limited experience comes almost exclusively from my mostly long-distance relationship with my paternal grandmother's decades-long partnership with Val Head, seen here a few years ago at their home in Cranberry Portage, Manitoba.

I only saw Val every few years after we moved to Alberta in 1979, but during the 1970s Val was involved in several memorable family adventures, including the time we wound up trapped on an island during a thunderstorm while on a fishing trip; we put baby Sean under the boat. Val was very good at catching, cleaning and cooking fish over a campstove (Mom and Dad were no slouches either); to this day my favourite meal remains fresh pickerel fried exactly that way, even though I haven't tasted it in probably 30 years.

Val also taught me how to utter a moose call, a party trick that I've used to amuse select friends and colleagues over the years, much to their collective amusement.

In recounting these memories I worry that I'm stereotyping Val in the "Indian guide" role; he was much more complex than that. He took care of Grandma, he played guitar, he had a huge collection of old Westerns on VHS, and he loved gadgets; for many years, Grandma and Val were early adopters of a bunch of cool technology, and in fact they passed along a very nice (for the time) video camera that I used through high school and university to make most of the silly movies Paranoid Productions is famous (?) for, including Bitter Litter and Generous Nature.

I'm glad Val was in our lives. I wish I'd asked him how he felt about aboriginal issues; he never mentioned the subject in my presence. He struck me as the type of person who just wanted to get along with others, but I'll never know what his true feelings were. If you fail to take advantage of your opportunities to understand people, you'll lose them. Maybe that's what National Aboriginal Day should be about. 

Full Fathom Fish Fry

Full Fathom Fish Fry
Cries the crier on the pier
Flipping fillets for five friars
Serving up his bitter beer

Drink your ale and eat your cod
Cries the fryer with his tongs
Handing out the fresh white meat
To the kings but not the throngs

Salutations from the grill
Cries the liar through his horn
Tossing condiments like hand grenades
To those who are not noble-born

This is not a protest poem
Cries the typist to his keys
This is just another artifact
Of art that's dying by degrees

Fish Farm Factory Freight Train

Fish Farm Factory Freight Train. The f-words found purchase in the fjords of my frontal lobes even as my eyes flicked across Jeff's sketches, fantastic flights of fancy from the fiddling fingers of a fine friend. Fish farm factory freight train? Forsooth, these funky frescoes flummoxed me. For what purpose did Jeff find himself fondly doodling four facsimiles of fundamental freakanomics? For fame? For fortune? For fun?

Fin!

Gone Fishin'

Grandma's Satellite Dish

Mom or Dad shot this sometime in the late 1980s on a trip to visit Grandma in Cranberry Portage, Manitoba. I wasn't on that trip, but I'm sure I would have been impressed by Grandma and Val's new satellite television antenna, which loomed large in their back yard for several years. Cranberry Portage is just a few minutes' drive from Flin Flon, so it's not as isolated as some northern communities, but the presence of this dish is a sign of the technology needed to tie tiny frontier settlements to the outside world. I remember being very impressed with their collection of movies on VHS, too. Up north, entertainment options were limited to fishing and whatever movies you could import from down south.

They're Not Biting

Once again I've used Photoshop to transform an old photograph from the family archives into a faux painting. This time around I was a little more ambitious, applying multiple artistic filters to the original image. I'm sure any real artist will decry this as an abomination, but it's kind of pleasing to my eye, except perhaps for the upper right corner. Something seems out of whack there, and I'm not sure what.

The original photo depicts my maternal grandfather and a couple of other people fishing under the bridge over the Churchill River just north of Leaf Rapids, Manitoba, sometime during the early 1970s.

I call this "They're Not Biting." It's meant to apply to the fish in the river and anyone reading this post.

3 Men in a Boat

A few random frames from an educational filmstrip that might have existed in an alternate 1970s. In reality, Mom took a few pictures of Dad, Sean and I on a couple of fishing trips on the Suwanee River near Leaf Rapids. I imagine fishing up there hasn't changed much, although perhaps everyone brings their cell phones on the boat, and maybe a GPS. Or maybe not even the cell phones - I don't seem to remember having coverage up there when Sean and I last revisited the place.

I have several vivid memories of our summer fishing trips, but the one that stands out most is the time the boat was racing along and I decided to reach out and try to pick a cattail as we passed by. That's how I learned why grass leaves are called "blades." I failed to pick the cattail, but the friction of my hand against the razor-sharp edge of the grass gashed open my palm quite efficiently. 

Don't forget to click to embiggen!

Manitoba Fish Stories

It's funny how the mind stores some memories firmly and allows others to slip away. I certainly remember the Purolator hats Dad and I are wearing, along with the orange cooler and Dad's rubber boots. I've forgotten the life jackets, though; the ones I remember were yellow, filled with segmented rectangles of foam.

Judging by the other photos included in this set, this shot was probably taken near Leaf Rapids by either my grandmother, her friend Val Head or our cousin Hugh Woods. Perhaps the Super 8 mm film that must have been shot on this trip (note the camera sitting atop the life jacket near Dad's feet) will offer more clues.

We often boated on the many lakes and rivers in the area. I wasn't a big fan of fishing, but I did love it when we went fast on choppy waters, bouncing on the waves. Once I made the mistake of reaching out to grab a cattail as we passed, and one of the plant's leaves gashed a deep cut in my palm. The pain was sudden, sharp and shocking. I never tried that again.

Once - perhaps on this very trip - I pointed to the anus of a fish we'd caught and asked what it was.

"That's it's asshole," Hugh said. "If you touch it, you'll die." I believed him, and my already strong aversion to touching live fish doubled. Oh, how I loved the meat, though - nothing in the world tastes better than the pickerel of northern Manitoba grilled over a fire.

A Bird on the Head

On the Labour Day weekend of 1974 or '75, my parents and I, along with Dad's mother and her friend Val Head, embarked on a fishing trip well north of the 57th parallel: to be precise, Mile 35 out of Lynn Lake, Manitoba on the road to Co-op Point near Vandekerckhove Lake. There we met Dad's friend Sheldon LeBlanc and LeBlanc's father-in-law. Dad met LeBlanc through Acklands, Limited; Dad set up and managed the branch in Leaf Rapids, while LeBlanc managed the store in Lynn Lake.

Before my recent trip to Alaska,this surely must have been my farthest trip north, a bumpy, desolate drive on barely-maintained gravel or dirt roads. I remember very little about the drive or the fishing (which Dad reports as "excellent;" apparently we caught plenty of great pickerel), but I recall with perfect clarity the unwanted guest that intruded upon our campfire.

Night had fallen, and it was terribly cold. The stars shone down through a clear black sky and the silhouettes of the tall pines, providing light but no warmth. For that,  the seven of us huddled around the campfire as steaks sizzled on the Hibachi. (It was so cold, in fact, that Mom put her feet right in the campfire and melted the soles of her shoes.)

Then, from out of the darkness came the rapid flutter of beating wings. A whiskeyjack landed right on the grill, attempting to steal a piece of steak. It managed only to burn its talons, leaping back into the night, circling the fire, twittering in annoyance. A moment later it landed again...right on the top of my head.

I yelled in pain as the bird's claws sank into my skull. The adults were astounded, and Mom ran into our tent trailer, searching frantically for the camera.

"Don't move!" everyone said. "It'll fly away!"

"Ow!" I responded pitifully, enduring the pain.

And so I stood there, stoic, my face scrunched up, trying not to cry. The whiskeyjack twittered arrogantly, and at last Mom emerged from the tent trailer. She got into position, raised the camera...and the bird launched itself back into the night the instant before she could trigger the shutter.

I grumbled a little and rubbed my head, having endured the pain for nothing, but now that I'm grown I certainly understand everyone's desire to capture the image; it would have been one for the books.

Trek to Timmins, Part Two

Read Trek to Timmins Part One.

When Air Canada employees offered to drive us from one end of the airport to another, I thought it would be cool to shoot some video, dolly-style. But I didn't get my camera ready quickly enough.

In the video above, Paul demonstrates how to ice fish. I was a little grossed out by the minnow impalement.

And here Sylvia takes the ATV for a spin on Lake Porcupine.

Finally, here are some photos and footage of the splendour of Timmins.