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Fishing Expedition

Chef Lucia Watson’s innovative techniques put local fish dishes within reach - even for urban types.

I’ve been writing about local eating, food miles, organics, and the importance of paying attention to our food-distribution system for years and years. But I have to confess that I completely missed this one obvious truth: People who fish have always eaten locally. They can tell you the exact stream or lake where their food emerged. Heck, they can even tell you how much of a fight their food put up. 

So how did this fact escape me? I guess it’s because I’m such a born-and-bred city kid: I grew up, for all intents and purposes, in a TV room in New York City. And today, as a restaurant critic, I eat mainly in city restaurants, where most of the fish comes from ocean trawlers.

I’m embarrassed to admit that, until this season, I never had seen — never even heard of — a freshwater fish cookbook. Isn’t that absurd? After all, what’s more local than American streams, lakes and rivers?

The good news is that the errors of my past have been addressed by Chef Lucia Watson’s Cooking Freshwater Fish: 50 Contemporary Approaches to Classic Recipes (In-Fisherman, 2006), which was commissioned by people who also noticed the lack of good freshwater fish recipes, namely the folks at In-Fisherman magazine.

Watson is one of freshwater-America’s preeminent chefs; in fact, as the chef-owner of Lucia’s Restaurant and Wine Bar in Minneapolis, she has repeatedly been nominated for James Beard Foundation Awards as the Best Chef in the Midwest.

In addition to being a big-city chef, Watson is also an avid angler, a passion she developed during childhood summers at her family’s island cabin on Canada’s Rainy Lake.

“When I was growing up, the cabin had no electricity or telephones, and we just spent our summers running around like little wild kids,” Watson told me. “I’d fish with my dad, fish with my grandpa — there were always a ton of people around, and a lot of our life revolved around, ‘Should we go fish for walleye or bass? Crappies? Muskies?’ Or sometimes, just for fun, we’d go fish for northerns.”

When I asked Watson why northern pike were “just for fun,” we hit an obvious city-kid/country-kid divide. I might as well have asked whether it was OK to valet-park my Big Wheel at the latest downtown foodie hotspot. Northern pike, it turns out, is something you would only eat because you had to, not because you really wanted to.  

Happily, Watson excels at turning virtually any fish into something you — and definitely I — would want to eat. And though I will likely never take rod-and-reel into hand, I am finding her book invaluable, not least because it offers lots of innovative, deeply flavored catfish recipes.

I’ve known for a few years now that American farm-raised catfish is one of the healthiest, most environmentally conscientious, ethically pure food choices anyone in the Lower 48 can make. Yet just knowing I could eat catfish was doing me little good, since I didn’t have the foggiest idea what to do with the stuff besides fry it in cornmeal.

Watson’s book has changed all that: It features recipes for catfish in a Creole casserole; catfish grilled with sweetcorn sauce; catfish chili-dusted and served with cumin rice; catfish baked under a salsa of fresh tomatoes, jalapeños and garlic, and served with guacamole and refried black beans; catfish in gumbo; and, if that’s not enough for you, catfish as an option in any number of soups or chowders.

I had no idea you could do so much with this most local of inland American fish. That’s too bad, Watson explained — too bad for me and all the other people out there like me.

“Whenever I teach a cooking class, people have so much anxiety about cooking fish,” she said. “They are very fearful about it: ‘Will it be overdone? What if it’s still raw?’” But, Watson explained, classic American recipes like a catfish gumbo or a tomato-basil fish chowder (reprinted here) are designed to be all but foolproof.

“I think anyone who has anxiety about cooking fish should try something like a gumbo, and they’ll just be amazed. It’s much easier than cooking a fish. You make everything in one pot, throw the fish in last, put the lid on it, and don’t worry about it.”

Dishes like these are very flexible, Watson explains: “You can reheat them. You can put in seasonal greens or kale, or substitute a vegetable stock for a fish stock, if that’s what you’ve got on hand. You don’t want to boil a gumbo to death, of course, but just put it all on a simmer until you’re ready to eat. In the meantime, crack open a bottle of wine, relax, have some fun, enjoy your company — and enjoy the catch.”

Sounds like some eat-local advice that even a dyed-in-the-wool city kid like me can follow with ease.

Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is a celebrated food and wine critic. Nominated seven times for James Beard Foundation Awards — the Oscars of the food world — she has received four awards for her restaurant and wine columns. Since 2001, her work has been regularly featured in the Best Food Writing anthologies.

For the recipe pictured above, Tomato-Basil Fish Chowder, see Web Extras! at the top right of this page.