You Eat Gar?

Whenever folks on Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm saw my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird “whuppin’ gars” early in the morning, they hoped to be sitting at his supper table later that day. The old black man could cook anything to gustatory perfection, even garfish, which most folks consider inedible. Unchanged since the Jurassic Period, gars are bony on the inside with thick skin and scales on the outside. In a nearby creek, Jaybird caught gars on trotlines baited with gar hors d’oeuvres: putrefied carp chunks. To determine if the catch was edible, he used a short piece of four-inch-diameter pipe. If a gar’s body was too thick to pass through the pipe, bones in his flesh would be difficult to chew, whereas bones in flesh of gars that passed through the pipe would be soft like cartilage, and therefore edible.

The “whuppin” part facilitated removing skin and scales from flesh. First, he tied a string around the gar’s snout, and with the fish dangling, wound up the string. As the fish spun around, he tapped it lightly with a piece of hoe handle, a process that separated skin and scales from flesh. After slicing right behind the gills, Jaybird would jerk downward on the fish’s tail, separating skin and scales from the flesh, like pulling a sock off a foot. With nothing left but the gar’s eviscerated and beheaded body, he reached for his most prized possession, a switchblade knife. To determine if the knife was razor sharp, he used a technique as unique as the skin removal process. First, he broke a toothpick in half. Then he placed the broken end on the knife’s cutting edge and pressed on the toothpick’s sharp point with his thumb. If the slightest downward pressure didn’t make the blade slice through the toothpick, he continued stropping until it would. A sharp blade was absolutely essential for the final step in the gar preparation process: cutting across the carcass so that each slice rendered a piece of flesh the approximate size and thinness of potato chips. After letting the thin slices soak in a secret-recipe marinade, Jaybird coated them in an equally secret batter. When the grease in his cast-iron black pot, hung on a cross-staved tripod above a hot wood fire, was boiling furiously, the slices were tossed in, allowed to cook a scant few minutes, and removed, crisp and ready to eat. Jaybird’s guests always left the table raving about his Southern-fried-crunch garfish slices. Their delicious taste was unlike that of any other fish. A plate of them, along with a dozen of his famous hush puppies, was a meal fit for a king. I loved being with the old black man while he was preparing a garfish feast. When all the work was done and he was about to drop a batch of the marinated, battered slices in the hot grease, he’d give me a wink and ask a question I’ve never been asked before or after: “You eat gar?”