How To Cook Fish

An excerpt from our How To Cook Fish cookbook...

Page 1 HOW TO COOK FISH
THE CATCHING OF UNSHELLED FISH

"First catch your hare," the old cookery books used to say, and hence it is proper, in a treatise devoted entirely to the cooking of Unshelled Fish, to pay passing attention to the Catching, or what the Head of the House terms the Masculine Division of the Subject. As it is evident that the catching must, in every case precede the cooking—but not too far—the preface is the place to begin.

Shell-fish are, comparatively, slow of movement, without guile, pitifully trusting, and very easily caught. Observe the difference between the chunk of mutton and four feet of string with which one goes crabbing, and the complicated hooks, rods, flies, and reels devoted to the capture of unshelled fish.

An unshelled fish is lively and elusive past the power of words to portray, and in this, undoubtedly, lies its desirability. People will travel for two nights and a day to some spot Page 2 where all unshelled fish has once been seen, taking $59.99 worth of fishing tackle, "marked down from $60.00 for to-day only," rent a canoe, hire a guide at more than human life is worth in courts of law, and work with dogged patience from gray dawn till sunset. And for what? For one small bass which could have been bought at any trustworthy market for sixty-five cents, or, possibly, some poor little kitten-fish-offspring of a catfish—whose mother's milk is not yet dry upon its lips.

Other fish who have just been weaned and are beginning to notice solid food will repeatedly take a hook too large to swallow, and be dragged into the boat, literally, by the skin of the teeth. Note the cheerful little sunfish, four inches long, which is caught first on one side of the boat and then on the other, by the patient fisherman angling off a rocky, weedy point for bass.

But, as Grover Cleveland said: "He is no true fisherman who is willing to fish only when fish are biting." The real angler will sit all day in a boat in a pouring rain, eagerly watching the point of the rod, which never for an instant swerves a half inch from the horizontal. The real angler will troll for miles with a hand line and a spinner, winding in the thirty-five dripping feet of the lure Page 3 every ten minutes, to remove a weed, or "to see if she's still a-spinnin'." Vainly he hopes for the muskellunge who has just gone somewhere else, but, by the same token, the sure-enough angler is ready to go out next morning, rain or shine, at sunrise.

It is a habit of Unshelled Fish to be in other places, or, possibly, at your place, but at another time. The guide can never understand what is wrong. Five days ago, he himself caught more bass than he could carry home, at that identical rocky point. A man from La Porte, Indiana, whom he took out the week before, landed a thirty-eight pound "muskie" in trolling through that same narrow channel. In the forty years that the guide has lived in the place, man and boy, he has never known the fishing to be as poor as it is now. Why, even "ol' Pop Somers" has ceased to fish!

But the real angler continues, regardless of the local sage. He who has heard the line sing suddenly out of his reel, and, after a hard-fought hour, scooped a six-pound black bass into the landing net, weary, but still "game," is not dismayed by bad luck. He who can cast a fly a hundred feet or more finds pleasure in that, if not in fishing. Whoever has taken in a muskellunge of any size will ever after troll patiently, even through masses of weed. Page 4 Whoever has leaned over the side of a sailboat, peering down into the green, crystalline waters of the Gulf, and seen, twenty feet down, the shimmering sides of a fifteen-pound red grouper, firmly hooked and coming, will never turn over sleepily, for a last nap, when his door is almost broken in at 5 A.M.

And, fish or no fish, there are compensations. Into a day of heart-breaking and soul-sickening toil, when all the world goes wrong, must sometimes come the vision of a wooded shore, with tiny dark wavelets singing softly on the rocks and a robin piping cheerily on the topmost bough of a maple. Tired eyes look past the musty ledger and the letter files to a tiny sapphire lake, set in hills, with the late afternoon light streaming in glory from the far mountains beyond.

The Table of Contents...

I.  THE CATCHING OF UNSHELLED FISH
II.  FISH IN SEASON
III.  ELEVEN COURT BOUILLONS
IV.  ONE HUNDRED SIMPLE FISH SAUCES
V.  TEN WAYS TO SERVE ANCHOVIES
VI.  FORTY-FIVE WAYS TO COOK BASS
VII.  EIGHT WAYS TO COOK BLACKFISH
VIII.  TWENTY-SIX WAYS TO COOK BLUEFISH
IX.  FIVE WAYS TO COOK BUTTERFISH
X.  TWENTY-TWO WAYS TO COOK CARP
XI.  SIX WAYS TO COOK CATFISH
XII.  SIXTY-SEVEN WAYS TO COOK CODFISH
XIII.  FORTY-FIVE WAYS TO COOK EELS
XIV.  FIFTEEN WAYS TO COOK FINNAN HADDIE Page iv
XV.  THIRTY-TWO WAYS TO COOK FLOUNDER
XVI.  TWENTY-SEVEN WAYS TO COOK FROG LEGS
XVII.  TWENTY-TWO WAYS TO COOK HADDOCK
XVIII.  EIGHTY WAYS TO COOK HALIBUT
XIX.  TWENTY-FIVE WAYS TO COOK HERRING
XX.  NINE WAYS TO COOK KINGFISH
XXI.  SIXTY-FIVE WAYS TO COOK MACKEREL
XXII.  FIVE WAYS TO COOK MULLET
XXIII.  FIFTEEN WAYS TO COOK PERCH
XXIV.  TEN WAYS TO COOK PICKEREL
XXV.  TWENTY WAYS TO COOK PIKE
XXVI.  TEN WAYS TO COOK POMPANO
XXVII.  THIRTEEN WAYS TO COOK RED SNAPPER
XXVIII.  ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY WAYS TO COOK SALMON
XXIX.  FOURTEEN WAYS TO COOK SALMON-TROUT Page v
XXX.  TWENTY WAYS TO COOK SARDINES
XXXI.  NINETY-FIVE WAYS TO COOK SHAD
XXXII.  SIXTEEN WAYS TO COOK SHEEPSHEAD
XXXIII.  NINE WAYS TO COOK SKATE
XXXIV.  THIRTY-FIVE WAYS TO COOK SMELTS
XXXV.  FIFTY-FIVE WAYS TO COOK SOLES
XXXVI.  TWENTY-FIVE WAYS TO COOK STURGEON
XXXVII.  FIFTY WAYS TO COOK TROUT
XXXVIII.  FIFTEEN WAYS TO COOK TURBOT
XXXIX.  FIVE WAYS TO COOK WEAKFISH
XL.  FOUR WAYS TO COOK WHITEBAIT
XLI.  TWENTY-FIVE WAYS TO COOK WHITEFISH
XLII.  EIGHT WAYS TO COOK WHITING
XLIII.  ONE HUNDRED MISCELLANEOUS RECIPES
XLIV.  BACK TALK
XLV.  ADDITIONAL RECIPES
 INDEX

This are older recipes from an older book that is quite hard to locate a copy of.  Only $9.97 for your own downloaded copy.  No waiting, you can be enjoying these recipes tonight...if the fish are biting!  And, your satisfaction is guaranteed!