The Fish Fry Fiasco

So it was not really a fiasco but I could not think of a better word that started with F. Torkor is a fishing village and in the market there are tons of people selling dried and smoked fish and at school 4 of 5 days are some sort of starch with a tomato sauce with whole little smoked minnow-type fish. I am not a huge fan of the little minnows. I was talking to an intern last week about different foods and what we did and did not have in the US and what I have tried here along with a lot of other small talk. I also mentioned maybe I would call him and we could go to the market together and he could point out some of the things he was talking about. He then knocks on my door at 8:30am yesterday with a whole fish of unidentified species.

The before picture

It was a lake fish. I got dressed and he proceeded to take a piece of scrap roofing on the side of my house and clean the fish on it, very sanitary I am sure. First he cuts if open and takes out the egg sack, about the size of my palm and cuts the head off and put in the bowl. These are the best parts, or as they say here “very sweet” to anything that is tasty, not actually sweet like candy. So the fish is cut into chucks with skin, bones fins all left on and we priced to go get other supplies. I had already eaten breakfast and was not sure how this morning would play out and how fast I needed to cook this fish. So we wandered to town although it was too early for the market to be fully set up. Then walk back to my house picking up a bag of drinking water on the way, which I carried back to the house on my head. I am trying to build up some neck muscles to carry things like everyone else does here.

So back to my house, still not sure what we are going to do with this fish, and I say I would rather fry than boil it but we need flour. Boiled fish skin was one of the grosser things I have eaten here. Since the market was not set up we wander back towards where he lives to ask a neighbor. We ask a woman making balls of dough to fry and sell and she sends us to another. We stop by his place, a room maybe 10x10 feet separated by a sheet into a space for a bed and a space for a small couch. It is a room in a compound where I run into Millicent, one of my English students helping her family smoke fish.

Smoking fish

After some introductions, and buying a bag of flour for 50 peswas, back to my house to cook. We fried up the chunks of fish although I passed on him boiling the head for me. Instead he took it to campus where I am sure the kids would enjoy it more than me. Then he cooked the egg sack. He told me it tasted like chicken eggs but basically it was deep fried fish eggs with onion so it mostly just tasted like fry oil, onion, and had the texture of tiny little pellets. Right out of the oil it was ok but not my favorite. The fish was fine but not a tone of flavor, more of an oily fish than a clean flavor like trout. He took the head to the school, I went to town, and when I came back had the fish for lunch but with tons of bones it was a bit hard to eat in the pieces he had cut so I did my best. I also was warned the night before about eating undercooked or spoiled meat here and it giving me a long term parasite so that also made it a bit less appetizing. In the end I probably only ate about a fifth of the fish and felt totally wasteful about it and bad because this guy spent a lot of time and bought me the fish. Oh well, lesson learned, be careful what you ask for when it comes to meat. I think I will stick to a mostly vegetarian diet for now and find some other places to get meat that I can cook myself, but maybe not fish.

After