Can't Beat a Catfish? Then Eat It
And the wine ingredient that brought down Rome
Episode 200: Cheap Wine Will Kill You with Jamel Johnson
I thought we'd talk about cava, but murder wine is more interesting.
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If You Can’t Beat ‘em, Eat ‘em
By Judy Colbert
“Blue catfish is really delicious,” says Doug Ruley, vice president of culinary operations at SoDel Concepts, a Delaware company with 12 restaurants. “Our catfish are wild blue and caught in the Chesapeake Bay. They are an invasive species in the Chesapeake, so by using them in all our restaurants we are doing our small part in helping to reduce the fish population in our waters.”
Sure, it’s a company line, but it’s true.
Blue catfish were introduced to tidal freshwater stretches of the James, York, and Rappahannock rivers in Virginia during the 1970s and 1980s. The idea was establishing a recreational fishery in Virginia with a highly-targeted, fast-growing species. The large fish attracted out-of-state anglers for economic stimulus with, among other things, numerous fish-catching competitions.
More recently, a few years of excess rains have lowered the salinity of the brackish waters between rivers and Bay, and now the blue catfish are found in the tidal Potomac River and well up into the Maryland waters of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s estimated that in the intervening decades, the numbers of fish have grown from a few thousand to more than 100,000,000 fish in the Bay area.
The largest of the catfish family in North America, these grow fast, can weigh more than 100 pounds (the Maryland record is 84 pounds) and can grow to five feet in length. Living for 20 years or more, the catfish have no natural predators (except when they’re fingerling size and below), and they’ve become a serious menace to the local fish populations. Catfish eat vegetation, crabs, rockfish (striped bass), mussels, oysters, shad, sturgeon, herring, menhaden, and almost everything else that inhabits the Bay.
Harlon Peace, of Harlon Seafood in New Orleans, says “once they’re above fingerling size, the only natural predators in the lower Mississippi are humans and alligators.” Regrettably, alligators in the wild in Maryland are few and far between.
The Maryland Department of Natural Resources asks anglers to “remove and kill any blue catfish they catch. It is illegal to transport live blue catfish into another body of water and anyone in violation of this can be fined up to $2,500.” If fishing is not your pastime, the filleted beasts can be bought at roadside stands. 🐟
More Food Media:
I just found out that Michigan State University has an online “Feeding America” library, full of scans of cookery books written throughout US history. The “Chinese-Japanese Cook Book” from 1914 is fascinating.
Lab meat: not really happening, when you crunch the numbers. All start-ups are Theranos.
h/t @AaronBillard
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I love catfish!
Re: Blue catfish...there is a restaurant in DC called Thip Khao that used to have a menu featuring invasive species like blue catfish and snakehead fish. I remember the seafood being pretty good and better than some farmed tilapia.