gastro & gusto
HOME COOKIN’
BREAM DANDY
If you bring beans to a fish fry, they’d better be baked by STEVE BORNHOFT
T
he bream bit on wigglers and grasshoppers with equal amounts of enthusiasm, and before long, I had a nice mess harvested from ponds dug and maintained by Jack Finch, who lives not far from Bear Creek in northern Bay County. Jack and his wife Linda are people whose generosity is so extraordinary that it is hard to know how to answer it, not that they expect anything in return. Jack granted me access to his ponds — “Take as many fish as you want,” he said — and also insisted upon cleaning the catch for me. He led me on a tour of his property, including outbuildings containing tractors, all manner of tools, projects in progress and a Gulfgoing boat equipped with the biggest outboard motor I ever have seen. Linda had much to show me, too, starting with a length of cypress tree, upright in her family room, that is festooned with dozens of fishing lures, all removed from snags in the creek. “Take one,” she said, and I selected an old-timey, wooden plug, a Devil’s Horse, that has fooled speckled trout in salt water and largemouth bass in fresh water for generations.
She directed my attention to shelves filled with ceramic angels and then explained that she has survived both cancer and a stroke and has a shunt that runs from her brain to her chest cavity. Medical intervention notwithstanding, she is convinced that she is looked over by a guardian angel, whom she acknowledges with her collection of figurines. I would leave the Finch property with the lure, venison sausage and a carpenter bee trap fashioned by Jack, along with the bluegills, which were destined for a fish fry at the home of a friend. I come from a place where Friday suppers of walleyed pike are a tradition, but especially in the South, fish fries are a special type of communion that brings together within a man his youth and his latter years; requires beer; invites storytelling; and is laced throughout with an appreciation among participants for nature’s bounty. There is, thankfully, no talk of the one that got away, and if a big fried bream is placed on a platter, it is likely to be ignored. They flat don’t taste as sweet or as good as the smaller ones.
FISH LINGO
Bream is an umbrella term that may be applied to panfish including bluegills, stumpknockers, shellcrackers, warmouths, red-breasts and paints, but not to crappie, which are sometimes called speckled perch. Bluegills are the most common of the bunch and occur throughout the country. Up North, folks call them sunfish.
76
October-November 2021
EMERALDCOASTMAGA ZINE.COM
photography by MIKE FENDER
