INDEX

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HOW TO COOK FISH

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THE CATCHING OF UNSHELLED FISH

"First catch your hare," the old cookery books used to say, and
hence it is proper, in a treatise devoted entirely to the cooking
of Unshelled Fish, to pay passing attention to the Catching, or
what the Head of the House terms the Masculine Division of the
Subject. As it is evident that the catching must, in every case
precede the cooking--but not too far--the preface is the place
to begin.

Shell-fish are, comparatively, slow of movement, without guile,
pitifully trusting, and very easily caught. Observe the difference
between the chunk of mutton and four feet of string with which one
goes crabbing, and the complicated hooks, rods, flies, and reels
devoted to the capture of unshelled fish.

An unshelled fish is lively and elusive past the power of words to
portray, and in this, undoubtedly, lies its desirability. People
will travel for two nights and a day to some spot
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where all unshelled fish has once been seen, taking $59.99 worth
of fishing tackle, "marked down from $60.00 for to-day only," rent
a canoe, hire a guide at more than human life is worth in courts
of law, and work with dogged patience from gray dawn till sunset.
And for what? For one small bass which could have been bought at
any trustworthy market for sixty-five cents, or, possibly, some
poor little kitten-fish-offspring of a catfish--whose mother's
milk is not yet dry upon its lips.

Other fish who have just been weaned and are beginning to notice
solid food will repeatedly take a hook too large to swallow, and
be dragged into the boat, literally, by the skin of the teeth.
Note the cheerful little sunfish, four inches long, which is caught
first on one side of the boat and then on the other, by the patient
fisherman angling off a rocky, weedy point for bass.

But, as Grover Cleveland said: "He is no true fisherman who is
willing to fish only when fish are biting." The real angler will
sit all day in a boat in a pouring rain, eagerly watching the point
of the rod, which never for an instant swerves a half inch from
the horizontal. The real angler will troll for miles with a hand
line and a spinner, winding in the thirty-five dripping feet of
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the lure every ten minutes, to remove a weed, or "to see if she's
still a-spinnin'." Vainly he hopes for the muskellunge who has just
gone somewhere else, but, by the sa