Yes, You Can Eat Sucker Fish

I eat weird fish. Put those words on a T-shirt and I will wear it. I'll try eating any fish. All of them. Every fish that I have ever personally caught, cooked and eaten has tasted fine. If its prepared fresh and butchered appropriately for its bone and muscle structure then in my experience its always going to taste just fine.

Last year I started getting really interested in red horse suckers because I kept pulling them up in my cast net from creeks and rivers in Virginia. Most suckers are shaped more or less like smaller carp, though they are not closely related. River red horse can get up to 30 inches long and I have personally seen schools of several dozen of them in that size range on the Rivanna River. Like most states, Virginia offers very liberal bag limits on some species of sucker fish and I decided that this situation was begging to have a cast net and the spice rack thrown at it.

This afternoon I hauled in a red horse of about 13 inches in my net and decided that this guy was going to be my first experiment in eating the species.

When I am experimenting with a new fish I like to use a very simple Greek-inspired recipe that showcases the meat without giving any off-flavors any place to hide. After all, everything tastes good deep-fried. I prefer a more subtle test.

Ingredients:

1 fish (a red horse sucker in this case)
2 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1 tbsp lemon juice
Grape leaves, sufficient to wrap completely around your fish.

Gut and scale the fish. Do not remove the head or anything else. Lay the whole fish down on the fresh (or preserved in salty water) grape leaves. You can substitute aluminum foil if grape leaves are unavailable. Drizzle the fish all over with lemon juice, inside and out. Sprinkle the oregano, salt and pepper all over. Wrap the fish up in grape leaves or in the foil. Bake in an oven until the eyes are completely white. The time needed to bake a fish varies depending on the species and the length. A 12 inch red horse should be done in 15 minutes at 375 degrees F.

Open up the foil or the grape leaves and go to work on the fish with a fork. If you are gentle in prying each bite off of the fish then you can avoid eating any bones.

Yes, you can eat red horse suckers. Yes, they are worth bothering with. I finished mine and I wanted another one.

The texture of the meat is not so firm as largemouth bass. More like tilapia, though if you are catching it yourself then it will be fresher and taste better than any tilapia that you find at a store. The flavor -- and this is based on a *very* fresh fish that was in the oven less than 45 minutes after I caught it -- is perfectly clean. Sometimes catfish will have a bit of a muddy flavor to them, but these fellow bottom-dwellers do not share that taste.

It was no trouble at all to clean the sucker. I had it gutted in about 30 seconds and scaled in less than a minute. The fins are all very soft and there is no part of the fish's body that can poke or hurt you while you are preparing it. You could clean and scale a dozen of these in 15 minutes, easily.

Throughout most of the range of suckers in the US, the species is thought of as a 'trash fish' when people think of it at all. But in some regions there is a whole cuisine and a body of traditions around it. Around the Flint River in southwest Georgia there is a long tradition of frying up suckers, which reminds me an awful lot of the cooking methods used for buffalo fish and carp in Missouri.

[Photo copyright 2012 by Jackson Landers. Somehow, when I put a wedge of lime on the plate there with it, the fish starts to look like food.]