Most of you over the years have come to know how I feel about religion. There is one aspect from long ago that you may not know. As is widely known, in smaller and smaller circles, it was my fate to grow up in the suburbs of St. Louis. This would have been in the 1930s. At that moment, St. Louis was a German town, the Germans having succeeded the French by several generations.
Looking back on it from the vantage point of 2009, I wonder how a Catholic custom became entrenched with those Germans. I had thought that they were all the Martin Luther variety which means that they were Protestant to the core. But the fact of the matter was that at least on Fridays nearly every restaurant observed the Catholic custom of serving fish. The further fact is that at that time, St. Louis was a meat-eating place and fish was rarely seen on any menu on other days of the week. But nearly every restauranteur in the St. Louis area served a dish on Friday that may or may not have been in the fish family.
The fish was called jack salmon. It is very difficult to find the meaning of jack salmon. It is not a sword fish or tilapia or anything that we now regard as standard fare in most restaurants. There may be a clue here in that the fish was called “jack” salmon. At that time, a good many people would use the word “jack” to describe something that was unauthentic. My mother always used that term to describe jack-leg preachers, that is, those without theological training. I have no idea whether the “jack” refers to the inauthenticity of the salmon, but that is about the only explanation I can offer.
The fish that was offered on Fridays in St. Louis was always served heavily breaded. One of our most courageous dictionaries defines jack salmon as “sort of a wall-eyed fish.” I assume that the fish came from local waters such as the Missouri River or the Mississippi River.
I often ate at a small restaurant owned by a Greek, Leon Leakopolis who was an uncle to Talis Lockos, my best friend, who did some of the cooking and all of the serving. For all the years that I had worked in the filling station business across the street from this small restaurant, I had been eating hamburgers. At age 16 or 17, I knew nothing about fine dining, but Leon, the owner of the establishment, offered jack salmon on Fridays. I considered it sort of a luxury.
When the jack salmon arrived in front of the eater, the first thing that was done was to attack it from the back. As I recall it, the jack salmon fell apart very easily and fell into three lengthwise portions and, if you could get through the breading, was palatable. I did not feel that I was making a major step toward the Gospel but rather I viewed it as a change in my eating habits once a week.
The fish was consumed on my lunch hour, which was not really an hour at all. It was how much time I could take away from pumping gas at Carl Schroth’s filling station. That might have been accompanied by a soft drink but certainly wine was not served in Leon’s place.
Largely because my memory is such that it may be lost to the memory of man, it should be noted that I ate a fish one day a week. Now at this stage in life I consume a fish on perhaps five days each week. Leon served only hamburgers and after several weeks they could become tiresome. So the jack salmon was a welcome relief, even though it was so heavily breaded that most of the taste was lost.
I recite the eating habits of my fellow St. Louisians, who were not cosmopolitan in any sense of the word, but I suppose they got the job done and here I am in the 11th inning of my life, still plugging along on two or three cylinders. If the truth were to be told that the term “jack” salmon had tended to disappear from my memory over the years, one day it suddenly reappeared. I don’t know whether that is enough to justify an essay as distinguished from the fact that I can recall events of the 1930s. As I recall it, the Catholics patted us on the back for being fellow observers of their religion, which bothered us not at all. It was a matter of stuffing the jack salmon down the same throat that had consumed hamburgers for the rest of the week. The Archbishop of St. Louis was named Glennnon. He was a lovable Irishman and if it made Archbishop Glennon feel better to see us all eating fish on Friday, I had no objection to that at all.
Well, that is the end of my history lesson on the culinary habits of St. Louisians during the Depression period. I know that this disclosure is not earth-shaking, but for old-timers such as myself it is pleasant to see that I can recall memories of 70 years or more in the past. If this essay inspires you to order jack salmon the next time you go out to dinner, I am quite certain that you will be totally disappointed. The waiter will tell you that he never heard of such a dish and only old St. Louisians such as myself could tell the waiter what the diner wanted. I leave you now secure in the knowledge that dementia has not taken over my brain at the moment. For a good many of us, that is a hopeful sign and one to be celebrated.
So jack salmon is really a walleye fish, but consumed with French champagne it goes down quite easily. Perhaps there is one other benefit in this essay in that it might put me in good stead if the Pope ever came to visit me in New Jersey, but that is an unlikely event.
E. E. CARR
December 14, 2009
Essay
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Kevin’s commentary: Reason #719 that I’d make a bad Christian: I’ve never actually developed much of a taste for fish, and have consumed beef, chicken, or pork almost daily for the last twentysomething years.
I also wonder if “jack” cheese is, by this logic, an inferior brand of cheese. I can’t think of anything else that uses “jack” as a modifier. In any event, I see it as no big loss that I’ve missed out on jack salmon.