Campfire Cooking - Catfish Stew

How do you survive in the wilderness? It doesn't matter whether it's today or 250 years ago, to endure in a wilderness type environment you need to have certain things. You need to have a particular kind of equipment, you need to have experience, and you need to have the right attitude. Today I want to talk about the survival situation of 1775. Nicholas Creswell was traveling in the interior parts of North America in 1775. He was a young English gentleman who came to North America to seek his fortune, and he thought possibly his fortune was on the frontier. So he takes a couple of trips into this interior part of what we now know as Kentucky. And he does this with some, let's say, rough gentlemen. To survive he needs to have certain kinds of equipment, and everyone who goes into the wilderness of Kentucky in this time period is going to have a musket or a rifle. They're going to have a belt knife and a belt axe, and they're going to have fishing tackle. I want to hone in on the fishing equipment concept here because I don't think we think about that too much when we think about today going out into the wilderness. We don't imagine that a fish hook and some fishing line is maybe one of the most important parts of our kit. So as Nicholas Creswell is traveling into the interior, he's traveling on the rivers, at least in his first trip. They spend all their time on the rivers, and the rivers are an amazing resource for North America. We have some of the most intricate and navigable inner waterways of any place in the world. So our rivers are very, very important, and they were extremely important in this time period. If you want to get quickly into the interior, you're going to go by river. And of course in the rivers we have a wonderful food resource, which are the fish. And today we shy away from eating fish out of our inner waterways because of pollution, but in the time period the fish were prolific and, of course, very clean. Nicholas Creswell at the very beginning of his journey, he spent several days gathering provisions. He found them scarce and expensive. He knew, and the rest of the group that he traveled with, knew that they were going to have to survive on the land. They were going to have to hunt for their food. It was the only way to feed themselves. So they took along all this equipment, muskets and rifles, knives and fish hooks and fishing tackle. The entire trip they mostly survived on what they found on the land. They ate bison, they ate deer, they ate turtle eggs, turkey and catfish. In Nicholas Creswell's journal we have several references to them catching fish and eating fish on this trip into Kentucky. Here is May 30th, 1775. He says, in our absence those at camp caught a large catfish which measured six inches between the eyes. We suppose it would weigh 40 pounds. That's a lot of food. On May 7th, 1775, we have a long entry and part of that is one of the company caught a large catfish which made a most delicious pot of soup. Now later on when they're coming back they are struggling because they are out of all their provisions. Many of the guns don't function and he mentions specifically that they've lost all their fish hooks and fishing line. Now I thought this reference specifically to making the fish soup was very interesting because if I was out on the river I caught a catfish the first thing I would think would be to fry up that catfish. Why would I go to the complex problem of making a soup? And we'll kind of discuss that as we're cooking here. We're going to cook up both a fish soup and we're going to fry some fish. To fry up this catfish we need to have a nice little fillet so cut off a fillet off your catfish and skin it and now we're going to take our very small frying pan. In this circumstance I have beef suet. Now they had been capturing a lot of bison so they might have suet and I'm taking a small amount of flour and yes they had flour along with them on this trip and just breading it on both sides. I don't have any egg whites I don't have anything like that with me so just a little bit of flour and then we're going to just drop that into our pan while it's nice and hot. Fish is such a very delicate meat you don't have to cook it very long so just fry it up on one side when it feels like it's cooked about halfway through flip it over and it will take a little less on this side because the bottom is already hot so take it off the fire and we can make sure to eat it up while it's hot. Our fried catfish is ready to try out and you know this is just the ultra simplest way to cook it and here we go. It's got wonderful smells wonderful texture the taste is incredible there are no real spices here just a little bit of flour maybe a little bit of salt and pepper that's all you need right out of the river and on the plate. I don't know why wouldn't they do this? After my 10th reading of Nicholas Cresswell this was the mystery that popped out to me. You catch some catfish and then what does he talk about? Making catfish soup. Why wouldn't you just fry it up? So much quicker so much easier less ingredients and doesn't take very long at all. Well I think I know the answer to that and the answer to that is most likely that they didn't have a frying pan with them. More likely they've got a little brass kettle like the one I've got back here on the fire and these brass kettles are lined with tin. They do not like to fry things so that is probably the reason why they simply didn't just fry it up. They didn't have you know large frying pans you're trying to cook for you know eight people ten people. I'm not sure exactly how many people he had on this trip going in with him but it was a number of men and so the best way for them to cook their catfish was making a catfish soup and that's what we're going to do now. This catfish soup recipe is a lot more challenging. We just have a description we just say it's catfish soup and we don't really find catfish soup in an 18th century cookbook so we have to kind of figure it out along the way. Now we have examples 18th century soup recipes but they're very complicated we make a fish stock sometimes by boiling a fish head and the fish tail and taking that out and but we're not going to do that. We're going to make a very simple basically a fish succotash. I've got some corn and corn is another one of those products that they had along with them he describes this corn multiple times so we've got corn and we're going to soak it and boil it and boil that for quite a while. It takes this corn a good long time of boiling before it starts to soften up so you might need to boil it in an hour or two just take a piece out every once in a while and bite it and see if it is at the right texture that you want to eat it at. You can cook it a little bit less and have more tooth or let it really soften up and this is like a dried hominy style corn. This corn may have been a little different he talks about it being sprouted but we're using this hominy corn. There's also a reference when he's coming out of Kentucky that they still have flour and they still have some bacon and corn and here we're going to be using a little bacon. Now originally you might want to basically cook a little bit of the bacon in the bottom of the pan very gently very quickly and then we're going to put our soup on top of that or in this case I'm going to cook a little bit of bacon in our frying pan and then I'm going to put that in with our cooked corn and then at the very end 15 minutes before we want to serve this we're going to put in pieces of our catfish that are chunked up. We're going to let this boil for 15 minutes and then it is ready to serve out. It doesn't take very long for this fish to cook up. Our catfish stew is done. We've got some wonderful smells here we've got a little bit of bacon we definitely have that corn coming through and then a little bit of fish but it's not the yucky fish kind of smell so let's give it a try. Now I'm going to just pull out a piece of the fish itself. It didn't have to cook very long the fish only needs to be in there about 10 minutes it was perfectly done and not overdone and the corn has a good texture too. There could have been a number of reasons why they chose to make a soup instead of just frying up the ingredients. One of the possibilities is they thought stew and soup were it was more nutritious because the liquid element that they weren't frying away the goodness. I'm not sure I think they were just they didn't have the right equipment but this truly is a great way to cook your catfish.