The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories (16 page)

For the purpose of this lesson, I will use my own experience of smoking my two steelhead. (I have witnesses to the catching, although I would not believe any of them myself.)

First, let me explain that most of my life I have been interested in preserving food by the process of smoking. As a child, I could never understand why my folks insisted upon preserving our own home-raised pork with curing salt rather than build a smokehouse. I can still remember rubbing curing salt into slabs of bacon. If my recollection is correct, my hands were better preserved than the bacon. My folks didn't seem to mind eating deteriorating bacon around March or April, but what could you expect from persons who made and ate homemade blood sausage and headcheese? Homemade headcheese always reminds me that there is such a thing as evil in the world. My family could gross out the average civilized diner at a hundred yards.

Eventually, at about age thirty-five, I finally made enough money to buy a hovel of my own and move my little family into it. It was sort of a small, suburban farm on which I thought we might be able to become self-sustaining by growing our own food and such. (Writers have such weird ideas.) One of my first tasks was to build, at long last, my own smokehouse. It was about two feet square and six feet high, and made of used cedar boards. I drilled a hole in the door and inserted the long proboscis of a meat thermometer through the hole, so I could keep track of the temperature inside. About six feet away, I dug a hole in the ground and lined it with bricks. I ran a sewer pipe underground from the hole over to the smokehouse. (I recommend that if you build your own smokehouse of this design, you buy a new section of sewer pipe.)

Thus I could build a fire in the hole with, say applewood or alder, and the smoke would cool as it flowed through the sewer pipe to the smokehouse. I could control the temperature by sliding a large flat rock back and forth over the fire hole. It was a very nice setup, except for the fact that visitors often mistook the smokehouse for a privy. This can be a real downer, especially for a person who loves his smokehouse.

I smoked all kinds of things in my smokehouse. For example, I once made antelope sausage, stuffing it in casings my wife, Bun, sewed from muslin. Even though the smoked links in no way resembled an antelope, my young daughters, still enamored of Bambi, refused to eat them.

Another time, I smoked some carp and took it to a party. I explained that it was salmon. The guests loved it, including two airline stewardesses who gorged themselves on the “salmon” to the extent that they became quite ill and were out in the yard . . . well, I won't go into that. They no doubt would have been much sicker if I had told them they had been eating carp.

Perhaps the most startling of my smoked creations was a turkey. I had forgotten to tie down its wing and legs, and it came out looking like a fat, brown Superman preparing to leap from a tall building. After laughing themselves sick, the girls refused to eat any of it.

For all these years then, I have been smoking various foods—mostly fish—but occasionally jerky. I once took some of my smoked jerky on a backpacking trip with a professor friend of mine, who referred to the gnarled little black pieces as resembling something that might be found in the vicinity of a small camel. He nevertheless ate a considerable quantity.

I should point out that I no longer use a smokehouse but a product called Little Chief. I don't usually name products, but as I view the Little Chief as one of the greatest inventions in the whole history of the civilized world, I do so here. Now at last, here is how to smoke a steelhead, with detailed instructions based on my own recent experience.

First, you go out to your garage and lay a sheet of plywood or perhaps an old door across two sawhorses. This will make you an adequate filleting table.

Do not—I repeat, DO NOT—attempt to fillet the steelhead in the kitchen. This can be dangerous to your health. I don't think an explanation is necessary.

Once you have the filleting table set up, take the fish from the cooler in which you transported it home. The fish will be bent in the shape of the letter C. That is because the cooler was too small for the steelhead. In my case, the cooler was very large, but I still had to bend the fish to get it to fit. I had covered the fish with ice obtained from a hotel ice machine. I can't recommend using hotel ice. It has no ill effects on fish but a good deal on hotel managers. Maybe you should go to the store and buy a couple bags of ice.

You might wish to speed up the process of straightening your steelhead. I recommend that you arrange the fish so that the bent part is facing up. Then you place a newspaper over the bent part and place a bag of lead shot on top of the newspaper. It has been many years since I've purchased a bag of lead shot, and I don't know how much it costs now. I would not recommend that you run out at this time and buy shot. It is better to substitute some other object, such as a heavy car jack. This will cut in half the time required to straighten your fish.

Once your fish has straightened out, you can begin the filleting process. First, remove the lead shot or car jack. Then take your fillet knife and—wait, I should say a word about fillet knives. Years ago, I bought a large fillet knife. Its blade is at least eighteen inches long and—in theory, at least—it allows you to slice off a large fillet from each side of your fish in a single graceful motion. The knife was very expensive but worth every dollar. For example, one of my sons-in-law once said to me, “Wow! What do you use a knife like that for?”

I said, “For filleting large steelhead and salmon.” See, the knife paid for itself right there.

Alas, in this instance, the knife would not penetrate the skin of the steelhead, and I had to resort to the small knife I used for cleaning and skinning perch. Once the fillets had been whittled off, I attempted to remove the skin from the fillets. Neither my large knife nor the small one allowed me to slice between the skin and the fillet itself. So I simply cut the fillets into three-inch-square chunks ready to go into the brine. I knew that after smoking, the skin would slip right off. Actually, it's quite a bit of fun, peeling the skin from pieces of smoked steelhead, provided you have a low entertainment threshold.

Once you have your steelhead fillets cut into chunks, just place them in a large bowl and pour two cups each of brown sugar and non-iodized salt over them. Then—well, in my case, I discovered at that point that I had only one cup of brown sugar. So I drove to the store and bought another package. The trip took scarcely more than an hour and $15 in gas. I poured the second cup of brown sugar over the fish and started to add the salt. It was at that point I discovered our salt was iodized. So I drove back to the store for non-iodized salt. This trip took scarcely more than an hour and $20 in gas. (The price of Regular gas had gone up in the meantime.) I poured the salt over the steelhead. This is a very simple method of making brine because salt and sugar will draw the juices out of the fish and provide the curing liquid. Because we usually eat the smoked fish within a day or two, I'm not sure about the degree of curing. You're on your own there.

I like to let the fish remain in the brine for eight hours. Because it was now two in the afternoon, the fish would be ready for the Little Chief by ten in the evening. Because I let it smoke for six hours, this meant by four in the morning my smoked steelhead would be done. I checked the TV guide for late-evening and early-morning shows.

And that's all there is to smoking a steelhead. Well, first you have to catch one. So while you're sitting there on your patio, watching your Little Chief puff sway, you may recall that the last time you were in a fish shop, fillets of smoked salmon were going for $20 a pound! You smile to yourself, knowing that this is your own steelhead you're smoking, the one you caught yourself. Indeed, you chortle out loud, thinking about all the people who choose to take the cheap way out. Ha! A mere $20 a pound! Those pikers!

The Teachings of Rancid Crabtree

T

he first time Rancid Crabtree came to visit at our farm, my mother called me in to meet the old man. I thought of him as old, even though he probably was no more than forty.

“Mr. Crabtree,” Mom said. “This is my son, Patrick.”

“How old is it?” Rancid asked, as if considering the purchase of some meat of questionable quality.

“Ten.”

“Don't have no dad, you say?”

“No, his father died when Patrick was very young.” Both of them looked at me as if I were to blame.

Then Rancid asked me the question that grown men in that time and place used to size up a youngster. “Gotcher deer yet?”

“Sure,” I replied, modestly scuffing a black mark in the kitchen linoleum with my tennis shoe. “Got him in the head with my .25/20 at 100 yards, a four-point muley. . . . ”

Rancid nodded approvingly. “He might do,” he said to my mother.

“Oh,
pshaw
!” Mom said. “He's never even fired a gun, let alone killed a deer. He tells stories like that all the time. Land sakes, he keeps me at my wits end . . . . ”

“Yup,” Rancid said. “He'll do. Shucks, ah couldn't lie like thet till ah was twice his age. Yup, he'll do . . . . ”

Those were the first words of encouragement I had heard in all my ten years. I felt the need to express my gratitude to the old man.

“Dressed out upward of a hundred pounds,” I said.

Mom rolled her eyes, but Rancid nodded in appreciation.

Until Rancid came along, I resided in a jungle of apron strings, those of my mother, my sister (the Troll), and my grandmother (Gram). Outnumbered three to one, I had fought diligently against this female conspiracy, whose stated objective was to turn me into a civilized young man, a creature never before seen in our part of the country, at least, to my knowledge. Since none of the conspiracy had ever seen a civilized young man as far as I knew, it was unlikely they would recognize such a thing if they saw one. It became increasingly clear to me that what they were trying to do was turn me into a civilized young lady, and I would have none of it. Still, there was some evidence they might succeed. One day, I even washed my hands before supper without being threatened. I was unnerved for hours afterward. The lapse shook my confidence.

Then Rancid Crabtree blew into my life like a breath of fresh air, although that simile is perhaps inappropriate. Among his other activities, Rancid was a trapper of skunks and other innocent creatures of the forest whose furs were bought by a rather creepy individual who passed through our county two or three times a winter. The story was told of Rancid that he had once done hand-to-hand combat with a live skunk, and the skunk had won, but depending on the direction of the wind, you couldn't tell any difference in him. Up until then, I believe he wasn't known as Rancid but as Clarence Crabtree, or something like that. It never seemed to me that Rancid smelled all that bad except maybe when he got wet on a hot day and you were standing too close to him.

Mostly, to me, Rancid smelled like freedom. He lived in a log cabin he had built himself, off in the woods at the foot of the mountains that reared up behind our farm. Although he would help neighbors with their haying or threshing, he would refuse to take money for his effort. As far as I knew, he had never held an actual job. It was considered impolite to mention the word “work” within his hearing. He told me that one time he had gotten too near an actual job, and it had put him in bed sick for three days, and he had never been that foolish again.

Rancid lived exactly the kind of life I planned for myself, and over the rest of my childhood years I studied him carefully.

In my opinion, Rancid knew everything worth knowing. He knew how to turn himself into a log or stump, for example, a talent you don't come across much anymore. He would sit down out in the woods, and in a few seconds he would blend into the earth with huckleberry brush sprouting out of his head and wild mushrooms poking out of his legs. Pretty soon, squirrels and chipmunks would be scampering around on him looking into his pockets and up his nostrils and wondering where this old rotting stump had suddenly come from. Many were the times I saw chipmunks race over the top of him, just like in a Walt Disney film, except the chipmunks in the film never gagged.

Speaking of gagging, I recall the first time I ever ate any of Rancid's homemade jerky. I was pedaling my bike past his cabin one day when he bellowed at me to stop.

“Ah want you to try this,” he said, as I dismounted. He dug into a greasy paper bag and pulled out a black, twisted object that looked like a dried mole or maybe something one might find in the vicinity of a small camel. A tremor of dread flowed through my taste buds.

“What is it?” I asked, hoping it wasn't something intended for human consumption.

“Ain't you ever seen jerky before?”

“Nope.”

“Wahl, this here is some b'ar jerky ah jist made. Ah made it the old way, smoked it over a willer fahr down by the crick.”

He started to hand me the dried mole, then suddenly jerked it back and held the thing up close to his eyes. “Danged bugs!” he growled, snapping a speck off the mole with a grimy finger. “Looks like ah made jerky out of some of them too. Har!”

Failing to share Rancid's mirth over the fate of the bug, I sorted through my vast file of falsehoods in the hope of finding one that would demand my immediate departure. None came to mind. So I accepted the jerky, popping it into my mouth like, say, a piece of bear jerky dried and smoked over a willow fire. It lay like a time bomb on my tongue. I was afraid to disturb it.

“Wahl, whatcha thank?”

I smiled faintly. “Mmmm.”

“Ah thank so too. Funny thang, though, ah cain't git the dog even to try it.”

Presently it became apparent that the dog was a creature of uncommon good sense. The dried mole, responding to the moist environment of my mouth, began to take on a life of its own. It began to swell. I gave a brief wave, leaped on my bike, and headed for home, hoping to be out of the sight of Rancid before I spit out the mole. I was surprised it just lay there in the dirt and didn't race off into the brush. Many years later, when I was much older and knew better, I accepted from an old trapper another piece of bear jerky that had been smoked and dried over a willow fire. Bear jerky hadn't improved one bit in all those years.