By F. Lawrence Fleming

The Voyage of the Halve Maen: First Mate Robert Juet’s journal entries for the first and second of September, 1609:

Tuesday, Sept. 1. Fair weather, the wind variable between east and south, we steered away north-north-west. At noon we found our height to be 39° 3′. We had soundings thirty, twenty-seven, twenty-four, and twenty-two fathoms, as we went to the northward. At six o’clock we had twenty-one fathoms. And all the third watch till twelve o’clock at midnight, we had soundings twenty-one, twenty-two, eighteen, twenty-two, twenty-one, eighteen, and twenty-two fathoms, and went six leagues near hand north-north-west. Sept. 2. In the morning close weather, the wind at south in the morning; from twelve until two o’clock we steered north-north-west, and had sounding twenty-one fathoms, and in running one glass we had but sixteen fathoms, then seventeen, and so more and more shallow until it came to twelve fathoms. We saw a great fire, but could not see the land, then we came to ten fathoms, whereupon we brought our tacks aboard, and stood to the eastward east-south-east, four glasses. Then the sun arose, and we steered away north again, and saw land from the west by north, to the north-west by north, all like broken islands, and our soundings were eleven and ten fathoms. Then we luffed in for the shore, and fair by the shore we had seven fathoms. The course along the land we found to be north-east by north. From the land which we first had sight of, until we came to a great lake of water, as we could judge it to be, being drowned land, which made it rise like islands, which was in length ten leagues. The mouth of the lake has many shoals, and the sea breaks upon them as it is cast out of the mouth of it. And from that lake or bay, the land lies north by east, and we had a great stream out of the bay; and from thence our sounding was ten fathoms, two leagues from land. At five o’clock we anchored, being little wind, and rode in eight fathoms water, the night was fair. This night I found the land to haul the compass 8 degrees. For to the northward of us we saw high hills. For the day before we found not above two degrees of variation. This is very good land to fall in with, and a pleasant land to see. [Library of Congress, https://tile.loc.gov]

Captain Henry Hudson ordered the anchor to be dropped in eight fathoms of water, within eyesight of the Barnegat inlet, about six nautical miles offshore from the present-day Barnegat lighthouse on the coast of New Jersey. The sea was calm, with only light southerly winds. Captain Hudson had not liked the looks of the inlet once he had given the order to luff the ship in towards the shore, and they had managed to sail close by. The number and size of the breakers in the inlet were a clear indication of strong tidal currents flowing over dangerous shoals. The captain had afterwards considered the possibility of anchoring the ship closer to shore and launching the longboat with a crew of his sturdiest sailors in order that they might explore the bay that he had up to that point in time only been able to view from the maintop. The Halve Moen was, after all, on a voyage of discovery, but the exploration of this long and lovely stretch of water that he had discovered would, at best, have been an intriguing distraction from his true ambition of finding a navigable passage across the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean. The inlet at Barnegat was hardly the entrance to such a waterway. The Halve Moen weighed anchor early the next morning and set sail on a northerly course towards the previously discovered estuary of the yet to be named and yet to be explored Hudson River.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can conclude that it was just as well that Captain Hudson had not chosen to stop and explore Barnegat Bay. The Barnegat inlet was a treacherous waterway. The Halve Moen’s longboat might have hit a shoal and have sunk in the midst of the tidal race that was running at the time, and Captain Hudson would then have been forced to abandon his task of finding the fabled northwest passage to the Orient and set a course back to Europe with what was left of his crew—and without a lifeboat. The Hudson River would have been named after someone else. Maybe it would have been named the Giovanni River, after the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, who in 1524 captained the first ship to ever drop anchor in Lower New York Bay. Maybe it would have been named the Mahicannittuk River, which is what the Mohican people, who lived along its shores, called it (i.e., the river which flows in both directions), although this name would have been difficult to pronounce for most non-Mohicans. Most likely it would have simply been called, as it sometimes is to this day, the North River, which is what the Dutch of New Netherland came to call it (i.e., Noort Rivier) in the early seventeenth century.

The Lenape people were never a warlike tribe, that is to say, they were not a warlike tribe until the arrival of Europeans to North America caused them to take up arms against the intruders on an occasion or two. They were culturally predisposed towards solving conflict amongst themselves, and conflict between themselves and people of other tribes, by means of diplomacy and compromise. Bows, arrows, and spears were normally the tools of Lenape hunters, not the weapons of Lenape warriors. Even after the Europeans began to make permanent settlements in the coastal areas of the royal colony of New Jersey where the Lenape had their traditional summer foraging grounds, the Lenape reaction to this encroachment was to relinquish their exclusive right to these lands for a nominal price in wampum and diverse trade goods, and afterwards to move their winter lodgings even further inland. In September of 1609, when the Halve Moen hove to off the Barnegat inlet, and the captain deliberated as to whether or not to send the ship’s boat through the inlet for the purpose of exploring the bay; unbeknownst to the captain, native people were at that time still residing in their summer camps along the western shore of the bay. Had the Lenape seen a strange vessel crewed by strange people entering the bay through the inlet, they would almost certainly have retreated into the pine forests in order to avoid any confrontation with the strangers. They had previously received news of these bearded, pale-faced foreigners from across the sea from people of other tribes with whom they had trade relations. They clearly understood from the stories they had heard that the White man was warlike and covetous; he was therefore dangerous and not to be trusted on any account.

The native people who migrated to the shores of Barnegat Bay every summer had very good reason to be wary of strangers. The bay was a veritable horn of plenty. The Lenape had been migrating from their inland villages to this particular stretch of coastline for centuries, primarily for the purpose of harvesting and processing oysters, dried oysters being for them the single most reliable year-round source of protein—when the hunt failed, the Lenape always had their hoard of dried oysters. Oyster reefs covered much of the floor of Barnegat Bay, usually extending into very shallow water. Harvesting these oysters involved wading into knee-deep water at the edge of an oyster reef on a calm day, and with the help of a hardwood rod that was forked at the business end, prying the oysters, one by one, from the reef and collecting them into a basket. (That which follows is pure speculation on my part; I have found no 17^th-century description of Lenape oyster processing:) At day’s end, the oysters were steamed, cupped side down, in a pit of heated stones covered in fresh eelgrass until the shells opened slightly. These freshly steamed oysters were set aside on the ground beside the pit to steep overnight in their own brine, and a new batch of live oysters was laid to steam on the bed of seaweed. The following morning, the oysters were shucked and then spread in an even layer on a wicker tray. Once full, this tray was suspended over a bed of glowing charcoal until the oysters were perfectly dehydrated. The finished product was extremely lightweight and reasonably non-perishable, which is why fresh oysters were, generally speaking, not consumed at the time of harvest, but were preserved by drying and saved for the winter that was to come. (I have not found any reliable information on the manner in which the dried oysters were rehydrated and eaten. I imagine that they were soaked in salted water and then made into a stew that also contained various vegetables and aromatic herbs. When eaten on their own, dried oysters would have been extremely chewy.) (By the way, I subscribe to the theory that the shell middens that are found along the east coast of the United States were originally ceremonial in nature, and not simply rubbish heaps of the Native Americans. By the 16^th century, however, the citizens of Lenapehoking were probably no longer aware of the significance of whatever sort of ceremony this may have been. The pile of oyster shells that was the waste product of the Lenape oyster processing industry was dumped back into the bay in the same area along the edge of the oyster reef from which the oysters had been harvested. Because oysters in their spat stage have a natural tendency to adhere themselves to the shells of mature oysters or the empty shells of once living oysters, especially in Barnegat Bay where there was practically no other hard substrate available, the depleted edge of the oyster reef would, in this manner, have been fully replenished with mature oysters in about four-years’ time.)

Life was quite comfortable for the Lenape during the oyster harvesting season at Barnegat Bay. The waters were teeming with fish, and also with shellfish other than oysters, for example whelks and quahogs. Most importantly for foragers subsisting mainly on what the bay had to offer, there was even a great abundance of blue crabs which, were very easily caught in simple traps. Hunger was never an issue in the summertime. The Lenape could have continued to migrate to the bay in the summertime for another thousand years without ever disturbing the delicate balance of nature had it not been for the socially more primitive but technologically more advanced society that displaced them. But despite the average European colonist’s attitude of viewing the Algonquian Earth-Mother as an adversary to be beaten into submission rather than as a nurturer and protectress to be worshiped, Barnegat Bay continued its existence as a resilient ecosystem until long after the last Lenape people in the area had fled westward and had left New Jersey forever.    

The oyster is the first lifeform to practically disappear from the bay, beginning in the late 19^th century. Earlier, the Whites had followed the Lenape practice of sustainably harvesting oysters by hand from the edges of the oyster reefs. By about 1860, however, the oyster had gone from being a poor man’s subsistence food to being the wealthy man’s delicacy. The baymen began harvesting oysters with the help of shellfish dredges in order to meet the rising demand for fresh oysters in big cities like Philadelphia and New York City. By the 1920s, the ten thousand acres of oyster reefs in Barnegat Bay were not merely depleted; they were gone entirely. In the 1950s, enterprising children who lived in Jersey Shore towns like Tuckerton, Toms River, or Point Pleasant knew that summer people were willing to pay as much as 25 cents a dozen for fresh oysters. Most of us kids thought that 25 cents was a fortune well worth aspiring to; but our problem was: Where in the Barnegat Bay could a kid find as many as twelve oysters?

Despite the lamentable demise of the oyster, which, by the way, was caused by overfishing and the destruction of the oyster reefs, and not by industrial pollution and agricultural runoff, the bay was, as late as in the 1950s, still the resilient ecosystem that it had been in the days before the coming of Europeans to North America. The only substantial change to the waterscape of Barnegat Bay had occurred in the early 20^th century when land-development speculators purchased the old bay-side properties—that is, those large estates that were first established by gentleman farmers in colonial times—and decided that hundreds of acres of saltmarsh should be bulkheaded and filled in, in order to facilitate the building of resort housing as close as possible to water’s edge.

Nevertheless, we children who lived in this area in the 1950s had no inkling that these features in the land- and waterscape had not always been there; for example, we didn’t know that Pelican Island at the Seaside end of Barnegat Bay Bridge was essentially man-made. But we did understand that the water in the bay in the 1950s was just as clear and unpolluted by man, and just as teeming with interesting and often edible sea creatures—apart from oysters—as it had been in the days of the Indian.

My first fishing trip took place in 1950 aboard the FV Lindy, a gillnetter out of Barnegat Light, New Jersey. Captain Olson was the owner and skipper, and my father, who had served in the United States Merchant Marine together with Captain Olson during the war, was the entire crew. My mother and I had tagged along by invitation of the skipper, who was planning a day of recreational, but even competitional, fishing: whoever caught the biggest fish would win a prize. I was two years old and did not take part in the competition. Outside the inlet, the sea was very choppy that day, or perhaps it became choppy after we had been at sea for a while. The skipper and his crew, although seadogs from way-back-when, both got seasick. My mother and I were unscathed by the choppy sea, and on top of everything else, my mother caught the biggest fish. I was too little to remember my first day at sea, and my mother never told me what kind of trophy she had won. Maybe she was awarded the honor of cooking that big fish she had caught.

The first time I ever caught fish was along Dillon Creek in Island Heights, New Jersey, when I was eight years old. I was tagging along with the local gang of kids to fish for what we thought were mummichogs, using bent dressmaking pins as hooks and bacon as bait. These little fish were really called killifish (killies) in our part of New Jersey, but nowadays I find that I like the old Indian name, mummichog, better. Anyway, I got myself hooked on fishing at the same time I caught my first fish. I decided at once that fishing was what I would do when I was grown up. It was, however, very difficult to keep the slippery bacon on the hook, because, as everyone well knows, there are no barbs on dressmaking pins. I decided to upgrade my fishing tackle with a conventional barbed hook, and I went to see an old friend of Captain Olson who ran a bait and tackle shop near the Barnegat Bay Bridge.

Mr. Brenner had been a bayman for many years, even before Captain Olson was ever born. It was said that anything old Mr. Brenner didn’t know about the waters of the Jersey Shore, both within the barrier islands and without, was just not worth the effort of finding out. Mr. Brenner said he was impressed with both the simplicity and the ingenuity of our fishing technology, but he agreed with me that it wasn’t very effective. He gave me a packet of no. 20 fishing hooks for free, and also a small spool of braided fishing line to use instead of my mother’s sewing thread, just in case I managed to hook something bigger than a mummichog. He then asked me if I was interested in a job. I found it difficult to contain my excitement and to act casual about my first job offer. He continued: Maybe I didn’t know it, but mummichogs are the best live bait there is for fluke and other bottom-dwelling fish. A charter boat captain he knew would pay me handsomely for a bucket of live mummichogs if I could catch them the evening before the boat was scheduled to leave the harbor in the early morning. Mr. Brenner gave me a wire minnow trap; he showed me how I should bait it with chopped chicken livers; and he then told me to take it to the creek and try it out.

My parents knew Mr. Brenner, whose wife had been my older sister’s art teacher in school, and thus they understood that he was on the up and up about the job offer. (Getting a bag of chicken livers at such short notice was somewhat problematic, however. My mother told me that I could chop them myself because she found the chore disgusting.) The trap worked like a charm, and I took my first bucket of living mummichogs to Mr. Brenner for inspection. Looking down into the bucket, he told me without taking a second look that what I had caught were not mummichogs, but the fingerlings of black sea bass, which, he said, are worthless as live bait because they will not live more than an hour or so in the bucket, and only a couple of minutes on the hook. The mummichogs are infinitely more resilient, and besides, fluke like the taste of them better than the taste of sea bass. He said that I was obviously fishing too near the mouth of the creek, and that I should move the trap to a place somewhere above where all the boats were moored, where the water was less saline. I did as he had recommended; I left the trap in the creek overnight; and I came back to him early the next day with a bucketful of very lively mummichogs. Some of them even jumped out of the bucket when I took off the lid, but I put them back in and closed the lid. As I was about to leave the store to empty the bucket of live fish into a nearby lagoon, a surf fisherman on his way to the beach at Seaside Park came in looking to buy live bait, and he bought the fish off me for fifty cents. Less the 15-cent cost of the chicken livers, I have earned money doing something I liked. I had thus become a contented commercial fisherman at the age of eight. Soon I would make enough money from catching bait fish to buy myself a rod and reel and become a subsistence fisherman, just like the Indians of old. About fourteen years later, I had the opportunity of signing on as deckhand aboard a commercial fishing vessel, and in the years that have followed I have not had reason to regret that I took that initial opportunity. Fishing is not the only thing I have done to make a living, but I have done a lot of it. I have, of course, eaten more than my fair share of fish, and I have learned how to prepare fish for eating according to the best traditions from different parts of the world.

Oh, the sea is so full of a number of fish,

If a fellow is patient, he might get his wish!

And that’s why I think

That I’m not such a fool

When I sit here and fish

In McElligot’s Pool!

When I was six, my father used to read to my younger sister and me on Sunday mornings, starting with the latest comic strips from the Sunday funnies and then progressing to some illustrated story from the 14-volume set of Childcraft books that my mother had once, in a moment of weakness, ordered from a door-to-door peddler of encyclopedias. We did, however, have some other children’s books, including a couple of books by Dr. Seuss. We had the 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins; Horton Hatches the Egg; and, my absolute favorite, McElligot’s Pool. You perhaps remember the boy, Marco, who is fishing in a miniscule body of water known as McElligot’s Pool. A local farmer, perhaps Mr. McElligot himself, pauses on his way past the pond to laugh at the silly boy. “You’re not going to catch anything in that pond but a discarded old boot or an empty tin can. That pond is too small to contain fish of any kind.” But Marco is not that disconcerted by the farmer’s scorn, and he considers the possibility that the pond is connected to the sea by a long underground river. Who knows kind of wondrous sea creature might swim in and take the hook.

As much as I have enjoyed working as a commercial fisherman, I have nonetheless come to consider rod-and-reel subsistence fishing to be the more honorable way to fish. You’re not making any money, but you are saving money by bringing food to the table almost for free, and probably without having to upset the balance of nature in the process. You are even afforded the primeval excitement of not knowing what wondrous sea creature might take the hook. Although commercial fishermen share this same excitement, they have much to answer for regarding unsustainable fishing practices and the resulting depletion of fish stocks and the devastation of marine environments. Therefore, my Jersey Shore fish recipes are tailored specifically for those who would like to cook the fish that they themselves catch.

Speaking of wondrous sea creatures, the monkfish (Lophius americanus) is the tastiest fish that can be pulled from the waters along the Jersey Shore, and definitely the most wondrous. Unfortunately for the subsistence angler, the monkfish lives its life on the bottom of the sea in a manner that makes it difficult to catch on a baited hook. It keeps to deeper waters, which means that if you don’t have a boat that is seaworthy enough for offshore fishing, you will have to buy your monkfish at the fish market. (The present-day [July 2026] price per pound for monkfish fillets is about $15, and worth every penny.) You are not likely to ever catch a monkfish, but it would be a shame never to taste one. When I was working as a gillnet fisherman on the northern coast of Norway in the 1970s, monkfish was one of those species of fish that were counted as ufisk (unfish), that is, fish that are either too ugly in life or, once cooked, too unappetizing in appearance, taste, and texture to be marketable. Monkfish were almost always thrown back into the sea, dead or alive. In more recent times, the marketability of monkfish, however ugly they may still be, has been redefined even in Norway.

The tautog, or blackfish (Tautoga onites), is the next tastiest fish that swims in the waters along the Jersey Shore and considerably easier for the subsistence angler to catch than monkfish. I would like to put the sheepshead, or convict fish (Archosargus probatocephalus), in third place. Although different species, the tautog and the sheepshead occupy the same sort of marine habitat (i.e., in and around natural rock reefs and rocky outcrops on the offshore sea floor, and in the immediate vicinity of man-made inshore structures such as piers, pilings, and jetties), and they both feed on the same kinds of shellfish and crustaceans (i.e., mussels, clams, green crabs, fiddler crabs, and shrimp). It is a popular belief that the cooked meat of these two species is so close in taste and texture to cooked lobster because neither of the species eats any appreciable amounts of other fish. This, I think, is an urban legend. Cooked monkfish fillet is even closer in taste and texture to cooked lobster meat, but the monkfish eats mostly other fish.

The tautog would not have been a very well-known fish species to the Lenape people of pre-colonial New Jersey, simply because the sandy and silty floor of Barnegat Bay, devoid of any rocky outcroppings, is not a suitable habitat for mature tautogs. As a matter of fact, it was not until the descendants of the original European colonists began to construct jetties and piers along the coast of New Jersey in the 20^th century that the tautog became an inshore fish. When I was a boy, there were only a few places on the Jersey Shore where tautogs were present and catchable from shore in abundance, most notably, perhaps, in the Barnegat inlet, where two converging stone jetties had been constructed in the late 1930s, inadvertently providing the tautog with an ideal underwater habitat only a few feet from shore.

In the 1950s, the tautog was considered something of an ufisk in New Jersey. For one thing, it is, like the monkfish, quite ugly and ungainly. The Native American name for the fish, tautauoga, translates into English as “sheep’s head,” and if you look the creature straight in the face, and if you are at all familiar with the facial features of terrestrial sheep, you will understand from its buck teeth why it is called tautog. It is also a slimy creature, almost as slimy as an eel, and almost as hard to hold on to. Nobody in those days thought that the tautog could possibly be good to eat. Fishermen came to the inlet because of the summer flounder, or fluke, big as doormats, easy to catch, and infinitely good to eat. Tautogs were a catch for local boys, who fished with handlines, and who would throw a fish back into the sea as soon as it had been caught, hoping to catch an even bigger one, and just for the fun of it. Besides, local mothers wanted nothing to do with such slimy, unsightly sea creatures. Boys were simply not allowed to bring any tautogs home.

In recent years, people have become more aware of the tautog’s superlative culinary value, but this is not due to any campaign to increase the size and the market value of the commercial tautog harvest. The commercial fishery that specifically targets tautogs is and will likely remain insignificant, that is to say, only about 10% of the total yearly harvest. The tautog’s favored seafloor habitat is nowadays largely contained in the artificial reefs that have been created along the coast of New Jersey, areas that would wreak havoc on commercial fishing gear such as bottom trawls, gillnets, and longlines. Commercially harvested tautogs are caught either by directed rod-and-reel fishery or as bycatch from lobster pots. Thus, if you are hoping to buy some fillets of tautog at the local fish market, you may have to return home with fillets of sea bass instead. (The annual commercial quota for black sea bass for 2026 is capped at 1,524,833 pounds compared to the commercial quota of 103,000 pounds for tautog.) If you go to some plush restaurant expecting to find braised tautog in a white wine sauce on the menu, you may likewise be disappointed. 90% of the total harvest is attributed to recreational fishery; however, recreational anglers are not permitted to sell their catch. They are expected to eat the fish they are allowed to keep and throw everything undersized or in excess of the daily bag limit back into the sea. All of these circumstances combine to make the tautog a perfect target for the subsistence angler: they are plentiful; they can be caught reasonably close to shore; the fishery, both commercial and recreational, would appear to be sustainable because it is diligently managed and stringently regulated; and, of course, the tautog is the tastiest fish available to the subsistence angler who fishes in New Jersey. For these reasons, I have dedicated my instructions and recipes for cooking fish to the tautog. Naturally, these recipes work even for cooking the other species of fish that inhabit the waters of the Jersey Shore, for example: black sea bass, striped bass, summer flounder, and winter flounder. I make two exceptions: bluefish and mackerel, both of which are fish with a very fishy flavor that is most effectively disguised by an hour or two in a smokehouse. Personally, I prefer not to end the watery existence of either of these two species of fish for the sake of my next meal.

Once you have caught your first keeper of the day—and in New Jersey a keeper is legally defined as a tautog that is at least 15 inches in length—you need to kill it by letting it bleed out, which is the conventional and probably the best way to send a fish to the hereafter. You’ll see other anglers on the jetty banging their fish over the head with a blunt instrument or sticking a knife through where they think the fish must have its brain, all in the belief that they are dispatching the fish in a humane fashion. Of course, if one is truly concerned about fish welfare, one should probably not be fishing—certainly not fishing in the sense of a form of entertainment in which the fish’s true value as a lifeform is its willingness and ability to fight back in order to attempt to regain its freedom.

As soon as you have decided to keep the fish, sever its ventral aorta, which is located in the soft area beneath the gills and directly behind the lower jaw, and then put it into a five-gallon bucket which you have filled with seawater for this purpose. (If you are unsure about how to use a knife for slaughtering fish, find a video on the Internet that shows commercial hook-and-line fishermen bleeding their catch. It’s not rocket science.) Once the fish has bled out, rinse it off with seawater and put it in a cooler charged with ice, or just put it back in the ocean on a stringer. The bag limit on tautog is usually five fish, but during the summer season only one fish, so you never have that many fish to keep track of. There’s no need to gut the fish until you get home, and cutting fillets or cutting off a fish’s head while you are still fishing is illegal in New Jersey. (Upon the eventual inspection of your catch by a conservation police officer, the officer would not be able to determine that you are complying with the regulations concerning size limits if the fish in your possession is beheaded and filleted, which makes sense in a silly, bureaucratic sort of way.)

I first learned to prepare skreimølje during the 1974 winter fishing season at the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway. (The arctic cod [Gadus morhua], called skrei in Norwegian, migrates from the Barents Sea to the northern coast of Norway each year to spawn. The spawning season is from January to April. The average size of the fish caught during this season is five kilograms. (The largest fish can weigh more than thirty.) Skreimøljeis fish cookery at its simplest and very best. The codfish is cut into 2” steaks, which are then soaked for one hour in cold, salted water (3 tbsp salt per liter brine). A kettle of salted water (1 ½ tbsp salt per liter water) is brought to a boil—sometimes half an onion is added, but sometimes not. The codfish steaks are transferred from the brine to the kettle; the heat is turned down so that the water is barely simmering; and the steaks are allowed to poach for from six to ten minutes, or until the meat just starts to flake. The steaks are served with poached cod liver cut into dice, thick slices of poached cod roe, and boiled potatoes and carrots. On the island where I lived, Flakstadøya, one usually drizzles over one’s plate with clarified butter in order to accentuate the delicate natural flavor of poached skrei rather than to mask it. The flavor and texture of tautog is even more delicate than that of skrei cod. It would be a sin not to treat tautog with the same fine spirit in which you would the humble codfish.

If you have caught your limit, you will probably find that you have more fish than you can consume at a single meal. You will have to freeze some or all of your catch for meals to come. The best way to utilize as much as possible of the fish, including the head but minus the entrails, is to cut it into fillets. This is something that is rather tricky until you get the hang of it. (On the Internet, you will find plenty of instructive videos on how to fillet a fish by people who consider themselves to be experts.) It is important, however, that you cut the fillets all the way to the belly of the fish. Then you need to remove the fillet from the skin. The part of the fillet that you want reserve to reserve for cutting medallions for pan searing is the bone-free strip along the backbone of the fish. The tautog is a chubby fish; thus, this section of the fillet should be almost oval in section. Before freezing, the strips should be brined in cold salted water (3 tbsp salt per liter) for at least an hour. Do not rinse them, but dry them off with a towel, prior to freezing. Freeze them in full length, protected in plastic wrap.

In order to prepare the ground fish from which tautog mousse is made, you will need to invest in a meat grinder. Choose the hole plate with the smallest holes, and run your remaining strips of fillet through the grinder once. Freeze the ground fish in 16oz plastic containers.

What you have left on the table after processing the meaty part of the fish will be used to make the fish fumet for tautog chowder. Remove the gills and discard these along with the skins. Cut the heads from the frames and cut them into halves. Cut the frames into shorter pieces and then rinse everything in cold water. These rather dreadful remains of your fish can be frozen in plastic bags for future use, but as these bags will take up a considerable amount of space in the freezer, it is a better idea to make the fumet at once and be done with it.

For one kilogram of heads and frames, you’ll need to make a mirepoix using olive oil instead of butter. Once the mirepoix is ready, transfer it to a stock pot and, over low heat, sweat the heads and bones for about ten minutes. Pour 8 ounces of white wine (preferably sauvignon blanc) into the pot and allow to cook over low heat for another five minutes. Add a good pinch of herbes de Provence that has been rubbed between the fingers, and then pour over enough boiling water to cover the heads and bones. Bring the pot to a boil and then simmer gently for twenty minutes. Pour this disgusting soup through a fine-meshed strainer and then through two layers of cheesecloth. Reduce to about half the volume and then freeze in 16oz plastic containers.

Torched medallions of tautog:

Set the oven at 400˚F. Grease a Pyrex baking dish with garlic butter. Slice the thawed tautog fillets into one inch  thick medallions and place these, cross-cut side up in the oven dish, closely arranged, but far enough apart that you can get to them with kitchen tongs. Pat the top surface of the medallions dry with paper towels. Sear this surface to a golden brown using a gas torch. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes. Transfer the medallions to individual serving plates using culinary tongs; drizzle with lemon butter sauce (sauce beurre blanc); sprinkle over with freshly ground black pepper and finely chopped parsley; and serve immediately.

I have always felt that serving good fish completely smothered in sauce is a sin. If you don’t like the natural taste of the fish you are eating, maybe you should be eating something else. I think that the sauce should help to accentuate the flavor of the fish, not to mask it. Nor is it necessary to keep the sauce warm before use because the hot fish itself will heat the cold sauce. Any of the classic French sauces for fish, for example: beurre au citron, hollandaise, sauce Nantua, or sauce Normande, will serve very well to accentuate the flavor of the fish. The humble garlic butter, melted and drizzled over the fish, is a good alternative.

Preparing fish in the form of baked medallions works best with monkfish, tautog, and sheepshead, all of which retain their firm, succulent texture when baked in the oven. Other kinds of Jersey Shore fish like fluke, winter flounder, black sea bass, and porgy, all of which tend to flake when baked in the oven, are better prepared as lengths of fillet, which are easier to transfer to the serving plate with the help of a spatula.

Regarding good, complimentary side dishes for baked tautog, my choices are usually oven-roasted asparagus, which can be baked in the same oven as the fish, and mashed potatoes, prepared to perfection from riced potatoes, milk, butter, and salt and pepper; kept hot in a bain-marie or with the help of the careful use of the microwave oven.

Cold mousse of tautog:

According to old French recipes, fish mousse is prepared by pounding fillets of pike (preferably) and egg whites into a thick mass with a wooden pestle, and then incorporating into this thick mass a copious amount of cold dairy cream. Even in days of old, when chefs were accustomed to very elaborate food preparation, the successful making of farce pour mousses de poissons was no mean feat. The forcemeat is, essentially, an emulsion, like mayonnaise. When worked entirely by hand, it can separate into a thick, grainy soup at any step along the way if the ingredients are not kept absolutely ice cold or if the chef’s hand grew tired from all the pounding. When separation did occur, this was considered a sure sign that the chef had recently been unfaithful to his wife. Nowadays, in order to avoid such double embarrassment, chefs use a dough blender, which almost eliminates the risk of the forcemeat separating into its component parts.

Thaw in the refrigerator one pound of ground tautog. Separate two large eggs into yolks and whites, which should then be lightly whisked with a fork. Dissolve one tub of Knorr vegetable stock concentrate into 100ml white wine, add a pinch of finger rubbed herbes de Provence, and then reduce this to a thick paste over low heat. Remove from the heat, and allow to cool. Blend in ½ tsp garlic purée, ½ tsp ground white pepper, and ½ tsp dried dillweed. Reserve this paste in the refrigerator. Work the ground fish with a hand blender into a very smooth, homogeneous mass. With a spoon, stir in the stock concentrate and blended spices. Refrigerate this for at least an hour. Empty the ground fish into the dough blender; set the machine to low speed and start it; and then begin to add the egg whites, little by little, until you obtain a thick, homogeneous emulsion that holds its form on a spoon. Depending on the machine, you may have to work the emulsion vigorously with a wooden spoon after blending until it comes together properly. Put the mixing bowl in the refrigerator for about an hour. After an hour, put the bowl of ground fish on the counter on a damp dish rag to hold it in place. Add 7 fl. oz. very cold heavy cream in a steady trickle while working the emulsion with a wooden spoon. At the very end, add the reserved egg yolks. It is important to stir the emulsion only to the point that the cream has been entirely incorporated. Too much stirring at the end of the procedure can cause the emulsion to separate. Check to see that the emulsion has enough salt by cooking a small quenelle in salted water. Add salt to the emulsion if needed. Grease two square 16oz ceramic baking dishes. Line the bottom of these with baking parchment and grease them one more time. Fill them to three-quarters’ full, carefully patting the top of the batter with a cold wet spoon to remove air pockets. Bake in the oven at 280˚F for about one hour or until firmly set. During the first half hour or so, cover the dishes with a sheet of doubled-over aluminum foil. Remove the dishes from the oven and allow them to cool entirely. The soufflé-like puffiness will quickly collapse back to the original volume. Carefully loosen the edges of the mousses from the oven dishes with a butter knife. In order to remove the mousse from the dish, place your hand over the top, and then turn the dish upside-down. The mousse should be firm but springy. Enclose the mousses in plastic wrap and keep refrigerated or freeze them. To serve, cut the mousse into ½ inch slices. Lay these slices as a layer on thinly sliced, buttered Pumpernickel (or other dark rye bread) covered in lettuce. Top this open-face sandwich with mayonnaise or aioli. (You’ll probably find it easiest to eat this kind of sandwich as they do in Scandinavia—with a knife and fork.)

Tautog chowder, New England style:

Cut 3oz (about three thick slices) of salt-cured pork belly into ¼ inch dice. (You may find that you have to cure the pork belly at home, which takes from 7 to 10 days, but this freezes well and gives you enough salt pork for many pots of chowder.) In the bottom of a Dutch oven, render the salt pork until it is almost crispy. Remove the fried pork from the pot with a spatula and transfer it to a plate lined with several lagers of paper towel. Into the hot pork fat put one cup of chopped onion, two thirds of a cup of chopped celery, and one third of a cup of chopped fennel. Sauté these vegetables over medium heat until they are translucent. Add a tablespoon of flour and stir until the grease is fully absorbed. Under constant stirring, slowly pour in a quart of hot vegetable stock that has been made from three cubes of Knorr vegetable stock concentrate. Add a pint of tautog stock and bring the chowder to a simmer. Add two cups of diced raw (floury) potatoes and let the chowder simmer until the potato dice begins to disintegrate. Add about a pound kilogram of tautog fillets cut into small chunks, bring the pot back to a simmer and continue to simmer until the fish is cooked but has not yet begun to flake. Add 8 fl. oz. of heated heavy cream. Add salt, if needed, and also several twists of black pepper and a fistful of finely chopped parsley. From this point onwards do not allow the chowder to boil, but bring it very slowly up to serving temperature.