Because You Never Know Until You Try

The night before A. and my's wedding eight years ago, A. went carp fishing on our beach with his friends. Better than a strip club, I guess. Also a good indicator of the sort of man I was marrying.

A. loves to fish for carp. They're so big, you see. And you can catch them from shore, which is much easier than loading all your fishing gear into a boat and sitting out in the sun all day. A. has caught a lot of carp over the years, but he always releases them. Because carp aren't good to eat. Everyone knows that.

Everyone is totally wrong.

See, my soon-to-be-brother-in-law spent his childhood on the Mississippi River, where his dad caught fish to sell commercially. And they ate carp. He told A. all about it when we were in Wisconsin last week.

Yes, carp are bottom-feeders, but so are a lot of other fish that people eat regularly. It all depends on the waters the fish live in. If you're pulling fish from disgusting, polluted rivers or lakes, then any fish is going to be nasty. But our lake is very clean and clear, so there's nothing those carp are eating that will make them taste gross.

So of course, when A. heard that, he was all fired up to try eating carp. And then his cousins came for their week of camping on the beach and pulled this in yesterday afternoon.

What's for dinner? Ugly-ass whiskered fish, of course!

I don't actually know how much it weighed, because I was not inclined to pick it up myself, but it was a heavy fish. Let's say ten pounds. Which could be completely off, but whatever. The point is, some BIG-ASS fillets came off that thing. A. hauled it right up to the house from the beach, filleted it, skinned it, soaked it in buttermilk, rolled it in flour, cornmeal, and pepper, and fried it in tallow. Half an hour after it was pulled out of the water, we tasted it.

Carp is really, really good.

In fact, I bet most people couldn't tell it from chicken in a blind taste test. That's how mild it is. Like chicken, there's white meat and dark meat. In this case, the white meat is better. When raw, the flesh looks a lot like tuna, and cooked, it's very firm and mild. Like, well, chicken. It had no fishy flavor whatsoever. Way, way better than lake trout. Carp are actually a highly prized game fish in Europe and also common in Chinese cooking.

Carp does have what are called "free-floating bones" in it, which means that even if it's filleted, you do have to watch out for bones. But we're pretty used to that, since the pike and pickerel we normally eat are very bony as well. I guess the bony fish are the best.

So once again, conventional wisdom is just wrong. Carp are good. You can take my word for it.