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Now let’s get to this week’s essay; a little story in my How to Fail at Being Finnish series called…
How to Dress a Pike in Cowboy Boots
I
I wore brown suede cowboy boots the first time I went fishing with my father-in-law. They had intricate guitar-shaped stitching, were embossed with tiny gold plectrums, and, most importantly, had just the slightest touch of heel for those few centimetres I was so desperate for when I bought them during uni. They would, unfortunately, prove just as capable as fishing gear as they were at impressing girls. In contrast, my father-in-law wore rubber boots that extended so far up his legs they were almost cupping his testicles.
But it was summer. The days my wife and I had free to stay at her parents’ summer cottage on a blissful island off the coast of west Finland were few. I was not going to let a pair of ill-suited boots, and regrettably tight skinny jeans, get in the way of enjoying all aspects of traditional Finnish island living.
If you’re used to the tender fattiness of salmon or delicate flakes of cod, the flesh of a pike might catch you off guard. So firm is the flesh that it rivals even those luxury seafoods monkfish and lobster in terms of “meatiness”. I’ve even heard the texture described as gluey. It’s for these reasons, I think, that it’s best served finely ground in preparation of that dish much-loved by the Finns: fried pike balls
II
Our fishing boat was a smaller, altogether leakier thing than the one we’d used the day before to reach the island itself. In place of a motor we had two oars peppered with splinters and, instead of a lifebuoy, an old plastic ice cream container to scoop water from the boat with. Luckily it had been a fine summer. Rain was a figment of springtime memory and the blue of the sky was the blue of an endless childhood.
My father-in-law, Keijo, stood oar in hand, navigating the boat from the shore like a Venetian gondolier. I kept seated so as not to cause any trouble. His movements were stiff but certain. Movements of a man who had worked on his feet his entire life and never once knew the luxury of a yoga class. Next to me and the ice cream box was a traditional Finnish fish trap called a katiska. Once we were a few metres into the water, he placed the oar back in its holder and started to row.
“How does this work then,” I said, pointing to the large heart-shaped wire-mesh trap at my feet.
Taking both oars in one hand, Keijo turned the cage and pointed to where the two curves of the top of the “heart” turn in and meet.
He looked at me through his thick, rimless spectacles. They made his eyes look half the size they really were. “Here, fish come inside,” he said, running his finger along the empty chamber. “Then they don’t get out.”
First, remove the skin from your pike fillets. I tend to do this with a knife I’ve neglected to sharpen for a while. Too sharp and accidentally cutting through the skin itself becomes far more likely. I make a small cut at the fin end of the fillet and gently work the blade under the flesh until I have a few centimetres of clean skin to hold on to. The key here isn’t fancy technique, just a little confidence. A little certainty. Take the skin in your left hand and, keeping your right hand steady against the cutting board, draw the skin steadily toward yourself, working it against the blade and ever so slightly from side to side, until it is all cleanly removed from the flesh.
Salmon, cod or pike, this makes for the cleanest way of skinning a fish fillet that I know.
III
He rowed toward the bullrushes that surrounded the island. Dragonflies landed fleetingly on the hull as we went. The light reflected off their translucent wings in all the purplest colours of the rainbow. So calm was the water that it broke only from the occasional blip of a fish peeking from the deep below.
“This is good place,” Keijo said with a smile. The bow of the boat nestled gently among the wiry and waving rushes. “Last summer, we had big fish from here.” He gestured with his hands exactly how big. Almost half a metre. Then he pushed the katiska toward me.
“You throw.”
Me throw? I thought. Where the hell was I supposed to throw it? I wasn’t even certain what throwing meant at that moment. Into the water? In the air? At a fish? Is that how fish traps work? Keijo was starting to stare. Waiting. I stood up, took the katiska and, with an uncertain, unrehearsed push, I slung it out a few metres from the boat toward the rushes. The water through the countless wire holes made a fizzing sound as it slowly descended into the clear then progressively murky water before slowly dissolving away. A cork attached to a piece of string, the other end of which had been tied to the cage, bobbled to the surface.
“That OK?” I asked. He didn’t respond.
All he did was raise his chin, turn to the water, and spit toward the very spot our cage had just foundered.
“Luck,” he said.
When I attempted to do the same, the spit landed in the boat.
I don’t think Keijo saw.
Slice your skinned fillets into chunks and add them to a food processor. Start blending and, while the machine is running, add an egg, some cream, a large pinch of salt and pepper, and a small clove of garlic, grated finely. It’s not traditional, but I like to season my fish balls, pike or otherwise, with a little Thai fish sauce as well. You can’t taste it, you might question whether it even does anything, but that’s what great cooking is all about sometimes. Once it’s broken down to a smooth paste, fold in some finely chopped dill and tarragon, though you could use whatever soft herbs you like most. Chervil would be lovely.
IV
My mother-in-law made it clear the next morning that lunch depended on what, if anything, we’d manage to catch. I don’t know if it was beginner’s luck or Keijo’s spitting, but fish, it turned out, would be on the menu after all.
Having rowed into the rushes again, I found the cork and string tangled in slimy, green algae. I took it in my fingers, stood cautiously, and slowly lifted it from the muddy water. The cage felt only as heavy as I remembered it the day before and I assumed we’d be going hungry. But then, just as the bottom of the basket came into view below the water, a terrible thrashing and bubbling of water erupted. The katiska began shaking in my hand, water spraying everywhere.
“Bring, bring,” Keijo ordered, louder than I’d ever heard him speak before.
Uncertain as to what was happening, I hauled the katiska into the boat and slipped down to my seat. Keijo and I looked at what we had found. In between us, occasionally convulsing violently, was a long, thin, monster of a fish. I had no idea what it was. I had no idea if it was even edible. Is it an eel? I thought to myself. Some kind of Finnish water snake I’d been hitherto blissfully unaware even existed?
Keijo stood up, opened the trap, and, with apparently no concern for the damage this thing might do to us, tipped the slithy creature into a bucket he’d readied full of murky water.
“Do you know what it is?” I asked.
Keijo was already taking the oars back into his hands. “Yes...” There was a smile on his face, a smile that grows increasingly manic every time I remember it.
“Hauki,” he said. “Good size hauki.”
“Is that a good thing?” I asked.
“It’s good.”
Prepare the mixture for cooking by lightly wetting your hands and, taking about 2 tablespoons of the mixture at a time, rolling it into balls. Set them aside to firm in the fridge. Then fry them in a little oil and butter until golden brown and just set throughout, about 2 or 3 minutes a side.
V
Back on shore, Keijo plunged his hand into the bucket and the cold, archipelago water went frothy with the movement of the fish. As he struggled to grasp it tight enough to pick up, his hand mimicked the movement of the fish, darting back and forth, left and right, in circles, until the action in the green, plastic bucket began to calm and his quivering hand slowly rose with the monstrous thing held tight within it. Not skilfully perhaps. Not demonstrating any special technique other than purpose. A sense of knowing it could be done.
He took the gasping animal over to a wooden bench beside us. Its skin was olive green and flecked with yellow spots that were almost leopard-like. Its flat head and vicious teeth made it look almost like a crocodile. If it was edible, it certainly didn’t look delicious.
“Careful,” Keijo said as I came to inspect it closer. “Hauki are biters.”
Then Keijo took a stubby piece of branch, and with one strike on the fish’s small, flat head its gasps were ended.
“We must be quick before birds come,” he said and handed the fish to me for gutting.
There’s no end of things you could serve with your pike balls. But for me, there’s no better friend to them than a cold sauce of sour cream cut with lemon juice, a little mayonnaise, and a great deal of finely chopped chives. And, of course, some very buttery mashed potatoes.
VI
Keijo handed me a blunt kitchen knife for the gutting job. I hadn’t been a cook for long at that point and I thought for a moment of the exotic terms I had learned for how cooks turn animals into food. We don’t kill them, we “dispatch” them. We don’t gut them but “dress” them. Such language felt profoundly foreign to me at that moment. I took the blunt knife and, as I’d been taught not too long before, made a straight cut behind its long head. I ran the knife along the belly and its guts slowly billowed out in various shades of black and red and pinkish grey. Then another cut along the spine in the same direction, the knife running against the vertebrae sounding like the drawn-out croak of a cartoon frog. The first side of the fish was released.
Flies began hovering already. Remembering that moment now I see seagulls circling overhead also. But I recognise I may have added that memory for effect. I then flipped the fish over and repeated the process a second time.
“Collect the guts,” Keijo said, handing me the bucket we’d had the fish in earlier. “Bring to compost.”
And, as I began collecting those entrails, I was certain I saw something crawling among them. But I don’t mean to say I saw something directly. It was more like something was moving hidden amongst them, like a cat playing under a blanket. And then I realised my mistake. It wasn’t another creature moving, it was the guts themselves. They were moving. The heart. It was still beating. I cut it from the rest of the veins and arteries and sinew to see if it would stop, but still it continued. Throbbing and pulsing, pumping blood that no longer flowed. I put the rest in the bucket, ready for the compost.
The heart I kept to one side.
*
I went back to it some hours later, hours after the hauki, or pike as I would soon learn it was called in English, had been turned into fish balls and served with mashed potatoes and a cold cream sauce the way my mother-in-law showed me how to prepare it. It was still beating, the heart.
I’d never seen anything like that.
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I love this piece. Having worked a lot covering salmon recovery in the NW, I could really “see” your story. Your father-in-law plunging his hand into the bucket was may favorite bit.
I thought it was going to be some sort of Finnish tradition where the pike are first clothed and then made to perform in a macabre puppet show. In a sauna.