An Omnivore Forages in New Jersey

Foraging in Jersey: Hook-Caught Catfish with Greens

By Mike Benigno
for Eat* Like a Vegetarian

Last summer and this, I’ve been thinking more and more about foraging for wild food. Some time off, put away the watch, ditch the cell phone, live off the land. Or at least pretend to.

While it may have not worked out too well for Chris McCandless in Into the Wild and I haven’t read the Krakauer book that inspired the movie, I’ve been building a small library of “livin’-off-the-land” food books, with the centerpieces being two works by Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Blue Eyed Oyster, and Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Asparagus is Gibbons’ guide to living off of wild, foraged food, identifying and proselytizing about close to 50 types of hunter/gatherer treats found right here in the northeast.

At and around Kittatinny Lake, my grandfather used to forage for cardone, a green, leafy weed that grew about as big as a large fern. Staring out the window of the car, walking to get the mail or while rooting around the yard, he’d memorize where plants were and when it was harvest day he’d be on his hands and knees, knife in the ground, uprooting the plants before piling them high on the backyard table. The stems were breaded and fried like chicken cutlets and came off the frying pan like stringy celery but milder and coated in fried goodness – pure, down-home comfort. They were usually gone or close to gone before anyone had ever sat down at the table.

Last week, the catfish were good for hooking. Over the course of the week with a friend, we managed to hook over 20 pounds of catfish, the biggest being a 4-pounder, with several that were over 3 1/2. On Tuesday evening I picked through one of two good worm spots I discovered, foraged the bait and got out to fish the sunset still-water between 6:30 and 8 (the best daytime action). I was on my way back to the dock when I thought I’d try a spot just off a house directly across from ours. Sure enough, I landed a high-3 lb. catty, came home, relaxed, dispatched the thing, then filleted it in the backyard. Last few years, I’ve gotten filleting down to about ten minutes for a catfish, much less for a bass.

I used a sharp knife, a pot of ice to keep the filets chilled and fresh, and proceeded to first cut the head off, pull out the guts, slit the bottom, then cut one filet off as close and even as possible. I got both sides off in two clean pieces, flipped them, skinned the outside, put them back into the ice water, then went back for the bottom flaps which didn’t make the filet cut (two fatty pieces near the pectoral fins). Inside, I washed off all, made an egg wash, coated them in what was meant to be a coating for fried chicken that I’d picked up (a kit from Ad Hoc, Thomas Keller’s simple California restaurant), and put them into about a half-inch of hot stove-top oil until golden brown. I sat down outside with the golden filets with some horseradish sauce, along with a side of mixed collard greens and red kale, cooked in some bacon with onion.

The result was a modern day forage. I turned a few backyard worms into a catfish into a meal on a plate and sat in the same yard where my grandfather would stack up his wild plants. To boot, as I ate out back near the lake, the fish carcass still stood on the cleaning block.

Hey, this is America, right?

Mike Benigno is a freelance writer and self-proclaimed omnivore. He lives in Brooklyn where he can be found fishing in nearby Jamaica Bay with his video camera. He is the author of Lines In the Street, a blog about fishing in urban areas. He can be reached at mikebenigo[at]hotmail.com