June
10, 2001
Trout and
Ethnic Cleansing
What happened to trout?
Of all the farm fed fish they're the most tasteless. Order one
in a restaurant these days and you get something tasting like
blotting paper. It was different once.
Listen to the
French writer, Jean Giono in "La France a Table": "Never
with butter, never with almonds; that is not cooking, it is packaging.
(It is, of course, understood that my recipes are not for all
comers.) With the exception of *truite en bleu* nobody knows
how to cook a trout. It is the most unfortunate fish on earth.
If an atomic bomb destroyed the world tomorrow, the human race
would vanish without ever having known the taste of a trout.
Of course, I am no more talking of tank-bred trout than I would
give a recipe for cooking a dog or a
cat.
"So, a
fine fat, or several fine fat, trout from the river, fresh (that
goes without saying), gutted, scaled, etc... A frying-pan previously
rinsed out with flaming wine vinegar. Make this empty pan very
hot. Into this very hot pan, a mixture of water and virgin olive
oil (a claret glass of olive oil to 3 of water). Let it boil
fast. Add a bouquet of thyme and nothing else whatsover except
2 crushed juniper berries and some pepper.
"Reduce
the mixture, and when there is nothing but a centimetre of fast
boiling liquid left in the pan, put your fine fat, or several
fine fat, trout gently into the liquid. Do not turn the fish
over. Cover the pan and boil 1 minute, then 3 minutes very gently,
and serve."
This rapid
boiling of oil and water is the way to make bouillabaisse, which
is fast food, the way fish should always be. Get the mix boiling,
just like Giono says, then throw in your firm fleshed fish like
bass or snapper with the smaller stuff five minutews later. Take
it all off after another three minutes, put a slice of bread
in each soup plate, a dish of aioli (garlic mayonaise) in the
center and go to it. Betcha George Bush wouldn't touch it.
We sent the
Giono to a CouynterPuncher friend raised in Colorado and elicited
this fierce reaction "Nobody from Colo would be caught dead
cooking a nice fat native brook trout that way. I disapprove.
Recipe: Give big fish away, they are likely hatchery fish.Clean
7" or smaller fish right away, leaving heads on, and wash
blood out of spine with cold water. Dry gently. Dip in flour,
then in corn meal. Fry very quickly but gently in a hot cast
iron pan, in either bacon grease or butter. Just until they
curl. Serve with lemon, hot buttered toast and glass of white
wine. Never put vinegar anywhere near such a nice fish. Why mess
around?"
Well, she has
a point, though we don't care for cornflour. When he was a kid
in Scotland a CounterPunch editor used to catch the little, pink-fleshed
burn trout and roll them in oatmeal, then fry them. Trouble is,
as our friend was tartly informed, brookies aren't native to
Colorado. It seems they were introduced before the turn of the
20th century to help provision miners and fostered later for
fancy tourism. Breeding faster and more frequently, they edged
out the native rainbows and cutthroat. As the
Navajo and Apache were to the Hopi (who called them The People
Who Came from the North and Crushed Our Skulls), so are the brookies
to the native, peace-loving cutthroats of Colorado's Rio Grande
and San Juan rivers.
Our Colorado
friend riposted tartly. "As the Chicanos say, How long do
you have to hang around before you're a native. Next you'll be
casting aspersions on yellow toadflax and leafy spurge."
A couple of
years ago, on a pack trip in the Golden Trout Wilderness in the
California Sierra, a CounterPunch editor moodily noted the lack
of any trout in a stream of high repute and was told that biologists
from the state's Fish and Game Department had decided the resident
trout were alien and poisoned them with rotenone. If they'd introduced
trout with the correct birth certificates, they hadn't survived.
Fishwise, the stream was dead for the next year and we're now
told by our friends Tim and Odette Larson who regularly pack
mules into the Wilderness, there are trout back seemingly identical
to the ones purged by Fish & Game.
This kind of
exterminism is not unusual. Take Davis Lake in the California
Sierra. Fish and Game poisoned it in a mad campaign of ethnic
cleansing, to get rid of an invasive pike. They did it for the
sports fishermen. Nothing living there as yet except the pike,
and the Townspeople still cannot drink the water, so we're told
by a nice lady in the local City Hall.
It is true,
this business of eradicating "non-natives" can go too
far. Back in Nazi Germany young Aryans used to hike about at
weekends, exterminating alien plant species and extolling "race
specific, blood and soil-rooted, homeland-oriented garden design".
A. Kraemer, a garden
architect, called for "race specific gardens, which have
their origins in nationality and landscape, blood and soil".
Flora as well
as fauna were marshalled into desirable and undesirable types.
Theorists of landscape design such as Willy Lange saw the purpose
of the "nature garden" as not primarily to please humans.
Plants, as much as animals, should have equal rights, with native
plants much preferred over alien species. Lange denounced the
formal garden as characteristic of the "South Alpine race".
These theories
of landscape and the natural garden, with the notion of rootedness
in the soil also had an anti-Semitic content, with the Jews,
like gypsies, being described as rootless nomads. One garden
architect proclaimed that "only our knowledge of laws of
blood and spiritually inherited property, and our knowledge of
the conditions of the home soil and its plant world (plant sociology),
enable and oblige us to design blood-and-soil rooted gardens."
This rubbish
was hotly contested by some brave souls, along them Rudolf Borchardt,
a Jew who died in 1942 trying to escape the Nazis. In 1938 he
made a plea for international garden culture: "If this kind
of garden owning barbarian became the rule, then neither a gillyflower
nor a rosemary, neither a peach-tree nor a myrtle sapling nor
a tea-rose would ever have crossed the Alps. Gardens connect
people, times and latitudes.
[That being
said, we would still like to throttle the person who imported
broom into the United States, brining it to Oregon in 1865. Try
uprooting any broom with a stem thicker than a stick of dry spaghetti
and you'll see what we mean.]
So leave those
alien brookies alone! CP
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