It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  On my second or third outing, I was boating fish at a nice clip when abundance mania kicked in. “Abundance mania”—a phrase so apt I’m surprised no one thought of it before me—describes the cocktail of neurotransmitters that unleashes the irresistible compulsion to collect more and more of something having three characteristics:

  •It has just come into season.

  •It’s suddenly everywhere.

  •It won’t be for long.

  I had already felt abundance mania when catching perch. Though I didn’t know this at the time, I would experience it in numerous picking-and-gathering situations to come. At the moment, the object was herring. I once saw an interview with Richard Pryor in which he was asked “how cocaine makes you feel.” He replied, “It makes you feel like doing more cocaine.” Abundance mania does the same thing. Catching a bunch of herring made me want to catch a bunch more herring. My state of mind combined intense focus and an insatiable appetite to collect the thing in question, with an overlay of euphoria. When you’re in this state, when you’ve got a fish on almost before your rig hits bottom, the only thing you can think about is the next fish. And the next. And the next. The idea of saying “enough” never crosses your mind. You know that you’ve become a lab rat pushing the lever that squirts an addicting chemical into its bloodstream, but it doesn’t slow you down. What finally interrupted my mania was a brief moment of clarity during which I realized that every fish I caught was a fish I would also have to clean. I stopped immediately. Hoisting the basket back into the boat required both hands. Then, because I hadn’t reeled in a fish in sixty seconds, I had to drop the rig down and catch a few more. Days later, relating the story to Gordon, I learned that any rig employing more than three hooks was a violation of local fishing regulations. (Incidentally, it was no great surprise that I learned this fact from Gordon, not Paula.) I have since modified my Sabikis to conform. It’s a trade-off. I catch fewer fish but also sustain fewer injuries.

  Onshore, I found that the fish filled my cooler to the point where there was almost no room for ice. I sped home, stopping for more ice at a 7-Eleven, and divided fish and ice between two coolers. I undressed by the washing machine in the basement. I knew I reeked—several people had motioned me ahead of them in line at the 7-Eleven. But I’d been exposed to the fish so long that the odor no longer registered. Herring scales winked up at me from my discarded shirt and pants. Scales lodged in the hair on my arms and chest. I felt happy as I loaded the machine. I walked upstairs and into a hot shower, where more scales rode the water down the drain. I was tired and hungry, but the last thing I wanted for dinner was herring. I grabbed a package of venison from the freezer, stew meat from the leg of a doe I’d killed six months earlier. I did a speed-defrost, dunking the meat in a large bowl of warm water. I fried some up and made a venison sandwich with pickles, mustard, and mayonnaise. I washed dinner down with one of the beers I’d home-brewed from a kit two months earlier. I fell into bed and slept the sleep of the fulfilled fisherman, which is similar to the state of a loose herring flapping around the boat when it finally gives up.

  The next day, I was eager to try both cooked fish and roe. Most of all I wanted to inaugurate my new smoker, an electric Brinkmann Gourmet that I’d bought at Home Depot for sixty bucks. I’d bought it after happening upon a foodie radio program on NPR, during which the guy—who sounded as if he’d be happier mixing cement than a ­béchamel—had said that oily fish were the best candidates for smoking. One of the more encouraging things I’d learned about herring from Gordon was that there was no need to gut and clean them. They could simply be filleted. He also said to leave the skin on and his say-so was reason enough, although I was curious about the rationale. As I worked, this became self-evident: herring skin was so thin that it would be next to impossible to remove. I cleaned fish for nearly an hour, and by the time I finished I had about ninety fillets.

  The first order of business was to try some fresh herring. I slid four fillets into a pan with some oil, sautéed them over medium-high heat until they had browned, and arranged them on a plate with toasted sourdough bread, butter, and a bit of mustard. It tasted . . . okay. To be honest, I was disappointed. I’d hoped to find it wonderful, but it was neither objectionable nor particularly appetizing, the taste at once fairly mild and fairly fishy. This, I decided, was the invariable characteristic of an oily fish. And perhaps why few people of my acquaintance ate herring. It didn’t taste that different from sardines, and I later discovered that in fact small herring are sometimes sold as sardines.

  I approached the two sacs of roe I’d saved with trepidation. They were kidney-shaped and sheer, with tiny red veins running through them. The eggs inside were pale yellow and appeared to have the texture of grits. I wished I’d known what the standard procedure was, because I knew neither how long to cook them nor whether the sacs should be kept intact or mashed in an attempt to cook the eggs evenly. I have always preferred ice cream mashed and softened, which may be why I did the same thing to the herring roe with a spatula, removing the pan from the heat when the roe started to turn gray. For a guy who has eaten chicken eggs his whole life without giving them a second thought, I was surprisingly creeped out by herring roe. Maybe it was a numbers thing. One chicken egg meant one unborn chicken. But the roe from a single herring represented thousands of potentially meaningful herring lives cut tragically short. I found myself coining an advertising slogan for herring roe—“A school-full in every spoonful!”—and took a bite. For a food with no particularly strong flavor—it tasted of the fish itself, only more so—I found it ­surprisingly . . . repellent. But then again, I once had real Iranian caviar and didn’t like that either. I’m convinced that scarcity alone is what makes some foods beloved of gastronomes. If peanuts were as rare as caviar, the height of debauchery might involve wealthy degenerates scarfing down mounds of Jif from porcelain plates. In any case, herring roe and I had parted company.

  Undeterred, I moved on to smoking. First I rinsed and dried the fillets, then arranged them on the smoker’s two circular racks until there wasn’t an uncovered square centimeter. At the last minute I salted the fillets liberally, reasoning that it couldn’t hurt. I plugged the smoker in and soon felt the warmth coming off the lava rocks sitting atop the electric heating element. I covered those with a half pound of hickory chips that had been soaking in water and put the top on. My new smoker looked like a big red suppository leaking clouds of smoke. I went inside and started working on a column about traveling to rural west Texas for a quail hunt with two other hunters and four highly trained dogs. In two days, we had failed to kill a single bird, which surprised the hell out of my companions but was in fact how most of my quail hunts have gone.

  Three hours passed before I remembered the smoker. I tore outside. Lifting the top, I released a ball of smoke. When it cleared, I saw that my beloved fillets had shrunk to one-third their original size, were nearly black, and were curling up at both ends. Moaning at my carelessness, I removed the racks to cool. I told myself exactly what I thought of myself, then opened an early beer to ease the sting of self-censure and bitter disappointment at the lost fish. Half an hour and two beers later, figuring that I had a responsibility at least to taste my work, I bit into a charred smoked herring. It was overdone, of course, somewhat crunchy and dry. And yet beneath the surface the meat still had an appealingly oily, smoky richness. What’s more, it had lost its fishy taste. I’d never had fish jerky and still haven’t, but I imagined this was roughly what it would feel and taste like. It was, I decided, against all odds, delicious. I would have liked it to be a bit less done, of course, but it possessed a pleasing combination of salt and fat, two essential traits of any commercially successful snack food product. And it was further seasoned by the knowledge that I had caught it, chilled it, scaled it, filleted it, washed and dried it, seasoned it, and smoked it myself. I felt slightly godlike, a state I can’t recommend highly enough.

&n
bsp; Stoked to smoke more herring, I redoubled my efforts at catching the little fish. The bad news was that, as with everything else in the Potomac, the runs of herring today are but an echo of those as recent as thirty or forty years ago. The good news was that when they are around, you can catch a lot in short order. I decided to bone up on smoking, too. I found a website, 3men.com, that was a trove of information about smoking everything, including fish. I began placing the fillets in an all-purpose brine the site recommended: two cups salt, one cup brown sugar, and a dash each of lemon juice and garlic to a gallon of water. It was recommended that after brining for half an hour or so, you allow the fish to dry in a “cool breezy place protected from flying insects” until a thin glaze known as a pellicle formed. The pellicle was said to promote the retention of moisture and texture during smoking. The closest thing I had to a breezy place was the backyard, but it was anything but protected from flying insects. As soon as I set the racks down, flies appeared as if I’d just received a truckload of fresh horse manure and was throwing a block party. My God but those flies loved herring. I rushed the racks back inside and pondered. It wasn’t possible to screen the racks. The best I could do was create hazards to aviation in the flies’ vicinity. I hauled out an old attic exhaust fan that took twenty seconds to reach full throttle, at which point it roared like a vintage fighter plane. It damn near blew the fillets right off the racks. I moved it around, experimenting until I found the right distance. At five feet, the fillets stayed put while the flies repeatedly tried to land on the meat, only to be beaten backward. I was delighted at having created a localized tornado and the fish developed a nice pellicle in about ten minutes.

  I began producing batches of gorgeous, mahogany-colored smoked herring. Two to two and a half hours seemed to be the ideal smoking time. I thought the quality was, in a word, astounding. I started eating smoked herring sandwiches for lunch and found myself opening the fridge at all hours of the day for just one more. Eating smoked herring was surprisingly similar to fishing for herring. You always wanted just one more. They were dense little things. I could put a whole one in my mouth—and routinely did when headed out of the house with both hands full of fishing tackle, to be savored at leisure while I was driving. But there came a point when I began to doubt my own assessment of my work, questioning whether pride of authorship had clouded my objectivity. I decided to take some to Gordon and Paula. I was a little nervous, not least because Paula was incapable of diplomacy. If she thought my herring sucked, she’d tell me straight out. They both pronounced it “excellent.” Paula, who has surprisingly high standards of food preparation for someone who eats roadkill, found fault only with the fact that I hadn’t removed every last scale. I could live with that. A single scale was exactly one more than Paula could tolerate. I cranked out about six batches of smoked herring before the fish left the river in late May. Paula called at one point to compliment me on my latest batch. I wasn’t home and was surprised to hear her on my voice mail. Paula almost never left messages. “I don’t know, there’s just something about talking to a machine that gives me the creeps,” she once told me. But she raved about the herring. “You know, really, this is the best thing you do,” she said, in a voice that sounded pleased that at last I’d found something I was halfway good at. Like nearly all of Paula’s compliments, it was barbed. With the praise for my smoked herring came the clear implication that everything else I did was okay at best. For once, I chose to focus on the unbarbed part of her approval. With Paula you learn to take what you can get.

  SMOKED HERRING

  (adapted from 3men.com)

  1 gallon of water at room temperature

  2 cups salt

  1 cup brown sugar

  1/3 cup lemon juice

  1 tablespoon garlic juice (or 1 tablespoon garlic powder)

  1 tablespoon onion powder

  1 tablespoon allspice (it is best to sift this into the water to avoid clumping)

  2 teaspoons white pepper

  Herring filets, the more the better

  In a glass, plastic, or ceramic container (basically anything but wood or metal), mix everything but the herring thoroughly until dissolved. Place the herring in the brine solutuion, ensuring that all pieces are completely submerged. Use bricks, plates, or other weights on top of the fish to maintain complete submersion. Put container in refrigerator or place ziplock bags of ice in brine solution to keep it chilled. Let fish rest in brine 6 hours. Or, if you’re bored, two hours.

  Remove fish from brine, gently pat dry with paper towels, and lay pieces on the smoker racks. Elevate racks—beer cans work nicely for this—to allow for air circulation. A fan speeds drying. After one hour—15 minutes with a fan—you will notice the fish has developed a glazed “skin.” This is called the pellicle, and you want it to seal in moisture and flavor. When the fish is sticky to the touch it means two things: that the fish is ready for the smoker and that you should wash your hands before sorting laundry while the fish smokes.

  Smoke fish for about 2 hours at 200 degrees F.

  Use your favorite wood chips when smoking; hickory, alder, apple, and cherry—or combinations of these—work well. (Never use soft woods, such as pine or poplar. Ditto for engineered wood siding products such as SmartSide and Hardi Plank.) Soak wood chips in water for 10 minutes before putting in smoker or grill. Add more wood chips about every 30 minutes, depending on what’s on TV.

  Oily fish like herring are pretty forgiving. They’re best at around 1½ to 2 hours. But I’ve fallen asleep, let them go four hours, and still found them tasty. They will also be smaller and drier. This is a good option if you’re packing to run away from home.

  Chapter Three:

  The Homicidal Gardener

  “How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence.”

  —Benjamin Disraeli

  With the spring run over and a store of frozen perch and smoked herring put by, it was time to figure out other edibles I could hunt, gather, or otherwise procure. Planting a garden seemed to be a sensible first step, even if I wasn’t enthralled by the notion. Agriculture, after all, is what replaced hunting and gathering, giving rise to civilization, indoor plumbing, and ranch dressing. Man cannot live by meat alone, although I would have been willing to give it a try, especially now that I’d mastered smoked herring. I had half-custody of Emma, however, and at this point in my life I still labored under the delusion that children need to consume the occasional green vegetable. By force, if necessary.

  While I knew zilch about gardening, I also harbored the notion that I might have a knack for it. This belief was grounded in having grown four killer marijuana plants in the backyard of the house I’d shared with Jane before we got married. I’d started about a dozen in peat pots and when, to my surprise, they’d thrived, I transplanted them to manure-filled holes on the south-facing slope of the backyard, hiding them among some kind of low landscaper’s shrubbery that grew there. Someone had told me you needed to kill off the males before they flowered, which made the females work that much harder, producing superior bud. I actually learned how to tell the sexes apart, thanks to the billions of Internet pages devoted to marijuana cultivation. Anyway, I fed the surviving females Miracle-Gro daily and hoped that the guy mowing his lawn ten feet away on the other side of the fence wouldn’t notice the pungent odor of ripening cannabis. When a friend tried the finished product he said, “Dude, you could get four hundred an ounce for this shit.” I felt as though I’d just won a 4-H Club blue ribbon. The same guy pointed out that in the state of Virginia, the police could basically take away your house if you were found to be growing pot. That marked the end of my marijuana cultivation career.

  One of the good points of the otherwise unremarkable house I eventually purchased after my marriage ended was its backyard. It was a full forty yards deep, a big chunk of real estate in Arlington, Virginia, and a large swath of it received
full, or nearly full, sun. It seemed like a good spot for a garden. I happened to mention this to my fishing buddy, Greg, who had experience as a gardener. He confirmed what I’d suspected, which was that the first thing I needed to do was plow up the lawn with a rototiller. “You want to rent a rear-tine model,” he said. “The others won’t be powerful enough.” I had no idea how a rear-tine rototiller differed from others, but I felt knowledgeable specifying one when I called a rental shop.

  “I assume you know you’ll need a truck to move this thing,” the man said. I didn’t know this. Nor did I have a truck—I had a 2003 Subaru Forester. But I did have a friend around the corner who would lend me his pickup. Bright and early the next day, I set out. Few things in a man’s life so lift his spirit as as heading down the road on a spring morning to rent a large, powerful machine with which he will destroy something. The rental contract resembled a bail bond application. I acknowledged that I could be maimed or killed by the machine and that they could seize my possessions and hunt me down like a dog if I tried to steal it. Then I was given a thirty-second lesson in its operation, which was inaudible over the hearty roar of the 6.5-horsepower Troy-Bilt pony engine. It seemed like the Abrams tank of rototillers. It sported lethally crooked twelve-inch tines, thirteen-inch pneumatic tires, and a cast-iron tine shield designed to prevent your legs from being turned into mashed potatoes. To have this much power at my command was intoxicating. I had marked off three beds in the backyard, each five feet wide and twenty-five feet long, using jade green Krylon Indoor/Outdoor spray paint, a much more vibrant color than the lawn itself. To move the rototiller, the engine had to be on and the tiller disengaged. I backed the truck right up to the slope of my front yard, dropped the tailgate, and drove the thing onto my property. For an instant, I was tempted to try rototilling the sidewalk, just to see what it would look like. I was certain the machine was capable of this but managed to rein in the impulse. I was less successful controlling myself when it came to the lawn. Having thoroughly plowed the three beds I’d designated with the spray paint, I went on to do two more of equal size. These last two were mostly in the shade, but what the hell. I figured there must be something edible that liked shade. By the time I was done, I had rototilled nearly 500 square feet of garden and felt like a god. (Just so you know, the shaded beds never grew anything. Not even grass, once I conceded failure and tried to reintegrate them into the lawn. It didn’t work. To this day there are two corrugated patches of dirt in my backyard, forsaken even by most weeds.)