The first meeting between chef and
carp came unexpectedly. “For 25 years,”
says the avid boater, “I took off from the
restaurant to go fishing religiously, maybe
two or three days a week. It’s a big thing for
me.” A few years ago, he was called in as
a consultant for a television show, to catch
and cook alligator gar, a prehistoric throwback fish native to Louisiana’s Atchafalaya
River. While he was out on the river with
a professional guide he’d hired to ensure
success, a pair of carp landed at Parola’s
feet. It was a big fish he’d never seen
locally, so the chef had a few questions.
Actually, just one question.
For a video of how to clean an
Asian carp (silverfin), and links to
amazing video of jumping carp,
as described in this article, visit:
www.BoatUS.com/Magazine.
For delicious recipes for cooking
carp, as well as an entire collec-
tion of terrific and easy onboard
recipes by food columnist Lori Ross,
with contributions from our mem-
bers, visit our exclusive cooking
site: www.BoatUS.com/Cooking
“Why doesn’t anybody want to eat this
fish?” he says. “I went home and found the
problem. There are too many bones in that
fish.” On this point, everyone but the carp
agrees. The carp’s Y-shaped floating bones,
which make it a powerful swimmer capable
of leaping into the air, also make it more
challenging to clean. Duane Chapman,
a fisherman and U.S. Geological Survey
wildlife biologist, in a video on the subject,
says it takes a novice about 20 minutes to
clean a carp. The result, according to those
who’ve eaten the fish, and those in other
nations for whom it’s a common meal —
carp have been cultivated for food in China
for thousands of years — is well worth it.
Parola compares the sweet taste to a cross
between scallops and crabmeat.
The Redneck Campaign
Betty DeFord, the otherwise upbeat
bar manager at the Boat Tavern in Bath,
Illinois, worries that there’s no solution
to the carp problem. From the converted
barge, on a branch of the Illinois River
called the Bath Chute, she’s seen the carp
problem multiply over the last decade. The
first carp she saw jumped into her boat
while she and her husband were out on
the water together. The second came in the
door of the bar, carried by a patron who
wanted to show off his strange catch. As
she chats on the phone, she watches them
jumping in the Chute, and says carp have
substantially altered life in Bath.
“This is a small community,” she says.
“Boating and fishing are the big things,
because there isn’t that much to do for
kids around here. This really has taken
that away from the kids. I’m a parent and
a grandparent, and I’m not going to put
one of our kids out there endangering their
lives. If we can reclaim our waters, we can
take our kids out, and people can take
their grandkids out and enjoy the watersports we once did.” DeFord won’t let her
grandchildren come out on the boat since
she took a blow to the shoulder from a
jumping carp that left her black and blue.
She recounts a trip in her 16-foot john
boat with her daughter and a friend who’d
never seen the carp. “We got into a school
of these fish not too far away from the Boat
Tavern,” she says. “They were shooting
up out of the water like torpedoes. There
were so many fish jumping, we were hitting them out of the boat with brooms. We
were using boat oars, anything we could
think of to protect ourselves. We were all
just a bloody, slimy mess when this was
over. We ended up with 32 of them in the
boat, not counting the ones we batted out.
Right then and there we decided this was
scary business. We had to do something to
deal with it.”
PHOTO BY CHEF PHILIPPE PAROLA
Back at the Boat Tavern, DeFord and
friends thought up a scheme to, if not get
rid of the carp, at least get some publicity for what had happened to their waterways. The Redneck Fishing Tournament
has succeeded beyond anything DeFord
had hoped. Every year (this year is the
tournament’s seventh), Bath plays host to
10 times its population of 350 people, and
they come with boats, bats, and nets to try
their hand at landing one of the world’s
easiest-to-catch fish: the silver carp.
At last year’s tournament, fishermen
took about 3,000 pounds of carp out
of the river, in four two-hour heats over
the course of a weekend. In years past,
DeFord has given the fish to a pair of physicians from Ames, Iowa, with a plan to
grind them into fishmeal and omega- 3 oil.
Another operation, in Pike County, Illinois,
fishes carp commercially and exports them
