BlatherMunch11: the blessed curse of leftover salmon

It’s what we serve to the Queen of England when she comes, or the Pope of Rome or our relatives from Indiana.

I speak of salmon, of course, The Chinook, the sockeye, the silver, the coho, the humpy; it's the definitive Pacific Northwest food.

Once there was a craving-to-loathing cycle: we'd kill for the first bite of it in the Spring, but by Labor Day, we loathed the sight of it. 

Dickens wrote that salmon and poverty went together, and it’s true, they once did. The fish clogged the rivers and streams on both coasts in the fall and were cheap as cucumbers or could be just picked up like windfall crabapples.

Our mothers could always pull a humpy out of the freezer in February at the thin end of the month. There was always plenty left over. Plenty left over.

At the school cafeteria, they made sandwiches using canned salmon hoping we’d think it was tuna. It fooled no one. It’s an extra sense that kids in the Northwest used to have: we knew left-over salmon, we could see it coming. (I see that same school-lunch salmon today on chunks of dark rye at smart cocktail parties. They call it paté. I call it leftover salmon).

We’d barbecue salmon a hundred times a summer, at home and for every public event and celebration -- golden wedding anniversaries, graduations, reunions.

For community occasions such as meet-the-candidates nights, benefit dinners for victims of small-town disasters, we had what was called “a feed.” You bought a mimeographed ticket to sit on a bench at long tables covered with butcher paper in the Legion Hall with forks and paper cups of black coffee and be served by the Ladies of the Auxiliary who'd blow fuses with their forty-cup party perks. There was garlic bread in tinfoil, baked beans in big electric roasters and cole slaw made with Miracle Whip; and pea salad with tinned pimientos.

In our town the entree was always BBQ'd salmon and the BBQ-ing was man’s work always done by the same man. His name was Bud or Earl, and he was a cigar-chewer and a mouth-breather and a volunteer fireman. He’d be up early slathering the filleted sides of the huge Kings with ketchup and garlic salt and worcestershire sauce. He’d slap on the orange slices.

He’d build the fire with the traditional alderwood, all right -- he'd swear by it, even --  but then he’d wrap the sides in firewalls of tinfoil so thick and so tight there was no chance the flavor of the smoke would spoil the taste of the ketchup.

Bud’s salmon was literally boiled in ketchup; and he’d cook the salmon so long, it'd make your teeth stick together.

(What was the best were the collars and back bones, salt & peppered and flopped down on the wireover the fire amongst the foil fish-coffins to be picked at all day by Bud and his beer-swilling kibitzers).

Generations of dads-to-be viewed Bud as a genius. They’d spend half their married lives trying to duplicate his recipe. On summer Sundays, insensate with nostalgia and canned beer, their su burban airspace would be smudged with alder and ketchup smoke.

(Their sons would ignore this manly ritual and wish they were having chicken. Their wives would either tolerate this obsession, or they wouldn’t).

Some of us would grow up to reject Bud’s recipe and the traditional ways. We would learn to eat raw salmon sliced thin with a glass of pinot noire instead of an Oly beer; or on Sundays, set bright sockeye filets briefly over mesquite instead of alder, letting it come in direct contact with the smoke and fire.

(Our sons would ignore this manly ritual and wish they were having chicken. Our wives would either tolerate this obsession or they wouldn’t).

Salmon are now farmed like herefords and picked like hot house tomatoes. They’re served up right in the middle of winter when humans should be eating red-snapper or pot-roast. It’s sad and it’s wrong.

Puget Sound is barren; so in the spring, salmon are flown into Seattle like lobsters from Maine; more expensive than a New York minute. They’re caught in Alaskan rivers which now have the same name dropability among foodies as French wine appellations. The Copper, the Yukon, the Crymea.

Those fish are truly great fish, fatty and sweet. In hushed, respectful tones, we're served tiny slivers amidst flecks of huckleberry essence and we eat them with little silver salmon forks we keep on chains around our necks.

But with all this wondrous rarification and branded perfection, we have but one 'plaint: where's our
leftover salmon?

Comments

[DT]

"I didn't make it out to a restaurant again, so I think I'll just write about fish in a reverential way. I bet the idiots who read my blog won't even notice."

[RedmondDem]

Not true, DT. You're an idiot, and YOU noticed.

[wta]

Blathering Michael has been spotted eating Pho and wild boar burgers this week. But the old bronchitis doesn't lend credence to reviewing.

In these days of salmon shortage scares, will we be seeing salmon at $50 per pound?

[Sarah su]

quit eating fish. i hope they go to $1000 a lb.

[joanie hussein for obama]

Well, at my little fishmonger - once frequented by the Blathering one and his wta - sockeye fillet is $13.98 a lb. Close enough if you ask me.

Sure is tasty. I rue the day it will disappear forever. I think that day is coming.

We over-fifty's have had the best of it.

Well, except for those who came before and tilled the land or mercantiled in the small towns supported by the farmers. They, too, had the best of it.

I sure do remember the good old days when my family would camp and pull in herring, trout, or get the mightly salmon from the sea. Before our big move to the city. What memories for a child of the great Skagit.

[joanie hussein for obama]

Commenting on your over-abundance at the dinner table of seasonal salmon:

When I was a kid, we had salmon often enough but never grew tired of it. No salmon satiation that you describe. And I can't remember ever having it in school. Mt. Vernon or Seattle.

The salmon I eat now is wild salmon but frozen of course. No farmed now nor ever. Besides, they say you mustn't eat farmed more than once a week - too polluted. Not good for you.

I read the Copper River salmon was not considered so great until recently with the decline of local stocks and warmer waters. Now, I, too, look only for the wild fish of the north. I take what I can get.

[joanie hussein]

Well, I guess I have to follow myself and continue to promote the might salmon. Just finished another good meal of previously frozen sockeye from the cold waters of the north. Mmmmmmm!