Fish Fry

This week, I will write about another Waschke family tradition: the Fish Fry. The Waschke Fish Fry was nothing like the hundreds and thousands of Fish Fries held all over North America. I’m not sure why the Waschke Fish Fries were even called by that name. They did involve fish, but the fish was always salmon slowly roasted over an open fire. The fish was never fried, never dipped in batter like fish and chips, and always a whole salmon.

I have been told that my great grandparents, Gottlieb and Bertha Waschke started the Waschke Fish Fry tradition. Gottlieb and Bertha had six daughters to marry off. One of our old neighbors told me that my great-grandparents hosted many large parties in search of suitable husbands for their daughters.

The generation that attended those parties is probably all gone now, but I remember occasionally running into folks who remembered my great grandparents’ parties when they heard my name was Waschke. Whether the Fish Fries were part of a scheme to marry off daughters, I do not know, but all my great aunts were married eventually, so it could be true.

But I also think my great grandparents, especially Gottlieb, liked a good big party. I think I have pictorial proof of this that I will bring out someday.

I mentioned in my last blog, Hog Butchering, that my grandpa, Gus, sometimes fed wheelbarrow loads of salmon to the pigs. From that, you might surmise that the Waschkes did not think much of salmon as food, but you would be utterly wrong. Salmon was a delicacy that rivalled my grandma Agnes’s cinnamon, raisin, and apple stuffed Christmas goose.

I don’t remember that my grandmother ever cooked salmon, except maybe in her spicy and vinegary fish soup. I once tried aalsuppe (eel soup) in a bierstube in Germany and I was shocked to discover that it tasted exactly like my grandmother’s fish soup, which she called “fisch stip.” I believe “stippen” is low German for “to dip”. I don’t quite understand Grandma’s name for the soup, but I loved it when she made it, although I also seem to recall that neither my grandpa Gus nor my dad liked it.

I had a similar surprise when I happened to read this excerpt from James G. Swann. The Northwest coast; or, Three years’ residence in Washington Territory. New York : Harper & Brothers, 1857. Pp. 108-109.

We did not wait till the fishing was over for our breakfast, but, when the sun got up high enough to shine clear above the peak of Mount St. Helen’s, old Brandy-wine [a white settler] called us up from the beach, and gave us a glorious repast of salmon, just out of the water, cooked in real Indian style by his Indian wife.

The choice part of a salmon with the Indians is the head, which is. stuck on a stick, and slowly roasted by the fire. The other part is cut into large, flat slices, with skewers stuck through to keep them spread; then, placed in a split stick, as a palm-leaf fan is placed in its handle, with the ends of this stick or handle projecting far enough beyond the fish to be tied with a wisp of beach grass to secure the whole, this stick is thrust in the sand firmly and at the right distance from the fire, so that the fish can roast without scorching. Clam-shells are placed underneath to catch the oil, which will run from these rich, fat salmon almost in a stream. Neither pepper, salt, nor butter were allowed during this culinary operation, nor did I find they were needed; the delicate and delicious flavor would have been spoiled by the addition of either.

I was so much pleased with this style of cooking salmon that I never wish to have it cooked in any other form, either boiled and served with melted butter, or fried with salt pork, or baked with spices. The simpler a fat salmon can be cooked, the better; it retains its flavor with perfection, and is more easily digested; and the only style is to roast it before an open fire.

Son of a gun. Swann’s (or Brandywine’s wife’s) recipe for Fish Fry salmon and the Waschke family recipe for Fish Fry Salmon were the same.

The Fish Fries in my memory were presided over by my uncle Arnold. His method was almost identical to Brandywine’s wife’s recipe moved forward a century in time.

My uncle began by starting a wood fire and topping it with green vine maple logs. He fastened the salmon to chicken wire netting with wires in a steel angle iron frame rather than sticks and suspended the rack over his fire. The salmon roasted slowly in the vine maple smoke. Vine maple sap and wood is sweet and gives salmon a unique flavor. Ivar’s Salmon House on Lake Union in Seattle is not the place it was when Ivar was still alive, but it made alder smoked salmon famous. However, for me, alder is a poor substitute for vine maple. I think my uncle would differ with Swann on seasoning: he used brown sugar on his salmon, but he would have agreed with Swann that the point of seasoning salmon is to taste the salmon, not the seasoning.

In the old days, according to my dad, Fish Fries often were inspired by the arrival of a member of the Lummi tribe with salmon. Later, we would get the salmon from fishermen off the dock in Bellingham or Blaine or a fishing neighbor would drop off a salmon. Still later, we bought it from one of the fish markets.

I often think that there must be a link between Waschke Fish Fries and the Salish potlatch tradition. The classic anthropological discussion of the potlatch tradition is found in Marcel Mauss’s book The Gift. Claude Levi Strauss also studied and wrote about Salish nations.

I know that in the fifties, my grandparents had occasional visitors from the tribe, sometimes bearing salmon, and, of course, I mentioned before that my father was delivered by a Lummi mid-wife. I also know that Grandpa traded potatoes and other produce with the Lummi. Exactly how the salmon tradition made the jump from the Lummi tribe to the tribe of Waschke Germanic interlopers, I don’t know, but I do know that the salmon at a Waschke Fish Fry and at the Lummi Stommish would be hard to distinguish in a blind fold test. And I have searched for German roasted salmon recipes that might have inspired Waschke Fish Fry and have found nothing. The most important similarity is the intent: the essence of potlatch is generosity and reciprocity among friends and neighbors. This was the spirit of the Waschke Fish Fry. The more partakers, the better.

Hog Butchering

Hog scrapers

Last week’s blog featured the old pear tree planted by my great grandfather, Gottlieb. The old tree and some welcome cool rain in Whatcom County reminds me of a several day fall affair that took place each year under the old pear tree— hog butchering. Usually in October or early November rather than September, hog butchering was both a job and a gathering of relatives and friends. The hog scrapers used for butchering were stored by hanging them in crotches in branches of the pear tree. The scrapers eventually were surrounded by the tree and grew into the trunk. They are still there, left from the last hog butchered on the farm in the mid-nineteen fifties.

The pear tree was close to the hog barn where Grandpa raised his pigs. See it in the real estate photo here. It is the building to the left of the barn. You can see the pear tree in the photo. If you look at the picture of the pear tree in last week’s blog, Remembering the Orchard, you can just see the remains of the old scalding trough.

Gathering

Hog butchering was a fall event in many cultures, including the north central Europe from which my great grandparents emigrated. The Waschkes must have carried the tradition of the community event over from Germany.

My grandfather, Gus, was at the center of the event, which occurred after the temperature began dipping into the lower forties overnight, cool enough that meat could be cooled without refrigeration before it began to spoil and early enough that cured bacon, ham, and sausage would be ready for the holidays.

Raising pigs

Pigs were fed on kitchen scraps, cull or spoiled fruit and vegetables, and skim milk, all by-products that Gus could not sell to his customers in Bellingham. Before refrigeration was common, whole milk was an unsaleable because it spoiled quickly. Dairy farmers any distance from markets sold only cream or butter. My grandparents, like most dairy farmers in the area, had a hand-cranked centrifugal cream separator. When electricity arrived, my grandpa attached an electric motor. He filled out the pigs’ diet when necessary with oats, wheat, corn, and barley he grew in the fields, but their critical role was to use the nutrients that could not be sold otherwise.

Hog salmon

My dad, Ted, told me that when he was a kid, Deer Creek used to be choked with spawning salmon in the fall. Grandpa would sometimes take a wheel barrow and pitch fork to the creek and return with a load of salmon to feed to the pigs. The wasting flesh of spawning salmon from the creek was not fit for humans, but the pigs did not mind. Feeding spawning salmon was a bit risky because pigs slaughtered too soon after feeding on salmon tasted fishy. That meant only the earliest runs supplied hog salmon.

Mash

My dad used to say that pigs eat almost anything, but their fussy digestion will slow their growth if their fodder disagrees with them. My grandpa, Gus, cooked the pigs’ rations to improve its digestability. Every few days Grandpa would cook up a batch of mash, a sloppy porridge of whatever was available, heated until the texture began to smooth out and become more digestible. Skim milk was often the liquid, but after refrigeration arrived, water was more common.

Hog mash was usually unappetizing, to say the least, but I remember fishing a cooked potato out of a batch of mash and eating it. The mash was just rough cull potatoes boiled in plain water with lots of dirt mixed in, which made an interesting seasoning. I could not have been more than five years old and I thought the potato was pretty good.

The scalding trough

Grandpa built a heated trough that he used both for cooking mash and scalding for butchering. The trough was about eight feet long and three feet wide. It was made from heavy galvanized sheet metal bent into an elongated U. The ends of the U were thick fine-grained first-growth cedar slabs that looked as if Grandpa had split them out with a froe and shaped them with an axe and draw knife. The sheet metal was nailed to the wooden ends and the joints sealed with tar. The trough sat on top of a concrete firebox with a low brick chimney for a draft at one end and an opening for stoking the fire at the other.

A few years ago, I demolished the old firebox. Dad had already salvaged the sheet metal of the trough to seal off a corner of a calf pen against the winter northeaster. The chimney bricks were held together with lime and sand mortar (no cement) and had fallen in a heap. The firebox itself was in fair shape. When I broke it up with the front loader on the tractor, I discovered that Grandpa had reinforced the fire box with steel water pipe, which held the concrete together in the heat from the fire.

Butchering day

On hog butchering day, Grandpa would fill the trough about half full of water and start a fire under it. Then butchering would begin. Pigs were scalded and scraped immediately after they were killed to remove the stiff and inedible bristles while preserving the skin which gives flavor to bacon and ham and breaks down into collagen that gives the characteristic taste and texture to many pork dishes.

Like most kids, I was a blood-thirsty little guy and I took in the butchering process with relish, but I won’t go into it here. My grandpa could kill and butcher a hog without flinching, but I saw him treat those same hogs with tenderness as he took care of them. He would suffer himself before he would allow the animals in his care to be hurt. Slaughtering was a fact for homesteaders and kindness and compassion in the face of gory necessity is both contradictory and endearing.

The organ meats and innards were divided up among the neighbors who helped with the slaughter. All together, there were often more than a dozen relatives and neighbors helping with butchering and sharing in the bounty.

The first day of hog butchering ended with the hog carcasses suspended head down from branches of the old pear tree. They hung on gambrels, wooden crosspieces with sharp iron hooks that secured the animal’s rear ankles,  They were left hanging over night to cool before the next step. I’ll write about that some other time.

 

Gus and Agnes

Last week’s blog was Leaving the Homestead, in which I wrote about our decision to sell the century-old Waschke homestead and how my great grandfather arrived in Whatcom County and my grandparents purchased the farm that I lived on until recently. This week, I will continue my grandparent’s story. To see current pictures of the homestead on the real estate market, look here.

The family historian’s dilemma

As an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Chicago, I was trained as a historian. I took classes on history and historiography taught by professors who were distinguished historians themselves and working daily with my fellows who were on the way to becoming professional historians. I learned about objectivity and the rules of historical evidence and integrity. Searching for, finding, and compensating for personal bias was part of this training. Now, I find myself acting as a historian of my family. I know much more of the details of my family than I ever hoped to know of the Yangtze valley in the eighth through the third century BCE, the area and time that I studied for my never completed PhD thesis.

Yet, I am much less sure of myself in writing about my family. When I was studying the state of Chu in southern China, facts were hard to find and harder to separate from the romantic stories that were told by later generations. But after the records were rigorously examined, you might find you didn’t know much, but at least you knew what you knew.

Writing about family is different. I have many facts. I remember things I was told and I have read letters and looked at records. Much of what I know comes from a little boy listening to his dad, grandpa, other relatives, and their friends, talking while they worked and rested. But it is hard to distinguish fact from mis-remembered fantasy. What can I do with clearly remembered stories told by people long dead? As a trained historian, I am loath to trust my feeble brain, but if I don’t, I leave the story untold.

I have a solution: I am telling it as I remember it. I could be wrong. Don’t let my credentials fool you. The stories I tell here would not hold up as journalism or history, but I am sincere in telling them. You must trust me that I am doing my best. But I am not even trying to be a good historian or journalist, not even a good memoirist. I’m telling a story here, trying to be true to the spirit of my memory. I try to fact-check and cross-check, but when the cows are all back in the barn, I am just spinning a yarn.

Brush, stumps, and shade

Starting a family on forty acres of brush, stumps, and semi-forest was a struggle. In Sometimes A Great Notion, Ken Kesey wrote about loggers cutting trees to fight the shade. For homesteaders in Whatcom County, shade was deadly. Cattle couldn’t eat trees and brush. Crops to put by for winter would not grow in shade. The old settlers’ brutal tactics in the life and death battle against the shade would horrify many people today. My father told me that in the early days the loggers left behind fir logs so large, farmers dynamited the logs to break them up into chunks small enough to burn and make space for crops.

The forest fire that went through the homestead when my grandparents were young was likely to have been intentionally set. Both the early settlers and the Lummi and Nooksack tribes occasionally set fires in August and September to clear the underbrush and open the forest floor to sunlight. The Indians used fires to encourage Camas lilies and other plants which they cultivated and harvested. A forest fire made land clearing easier, eliminating underbrush and shade which were barriers to cultivation. Hard to imagine a beneficial forest fire in these smoky days of August 2018. The fires threatened their homes and livestock, they also made life easier for the old settlers.

Dynamite

My grandfather, Gus, became a dynamite expert. He stored his dynamite in powder boxes suspended five or six feet up the trunk of a tree fifty yards behind the barn. If the dynamite exploded, the damage was minimized by suspending the explosives above the ground where the blast would dissipate in the air. Dynamite itself was fairly stable and difficult to set off, although it had to be kept dry and thawed carefully if it froze.

Blasting caps are small volatile charges that fire easily. The small explosion from a blasting cap would trigger a much larger dynamite explosion. The problem with blasting caps was that they set off easily and were enough to blow off a hand or blow open a chest. I heard a story about a guy who lost his hand when he attempted to scrape what he thought was mud out of a blasting cap with a nail. Gus stored his blasting caps in a smaller powder box on a tree twenty feet from his dynamite safe. I was always warned that caps were more dangerous than dynamite.

Childbirth

Living in their cedar shack, my grandparents struggled to clear land, grow crops, and raise cows, pigs, and chickens. On Sundays, they walked to rest the horses. During this time, two daughters were born, my aunts, but both died before they lived a year. My grandmother, Agnes, grieved over these deaths, still occasionally shedding tears many years later when she spoke about them to her grandchildren. I am sure my grandfather, Gus, grieved also, but he did not articulate his grief. Childbirth and infant care must have been difficult. No running water or refrigeration and long days working in the fields and with animals must have been obstacles.

Doctors were scarce and expensive. When birth came, my grandmother preferred a mid-wife from the Lummi tribe over a doctor from Bellingham or Ferndale. She was hesitant about physicians for her entire life, preferring herbal remedies and patience. I have the name of the mid-wife, a Mrs. Wells, but I have not been able to discover anything about her. At birthing time, she came to stay a few days, presiding over the birth and my grandmother’s recovery.

Shocking grain

My great-grandmother was known for her physical vigor. I heard that one of my great-uncles was born during fall thrashing. My great-grandmother tied up her skirts and went out to shock wheat in the morning, came to the house to give birth, and returned to shocking before the end of the day, leaving the infant to her older daughters to take care of.

I helped a little with shocking before my dad got a baler and hired a combine to harvest the wheat and oats. The standing grain was cut with a horse or tractor drawn implement called a binder. The binder produced bundles of grain stalks bound with twine. These bundles were gathered in to shocks of four or five bundles stood upright to dry. Usually, the grain was cut while the kernels were still soft. In cool and damp Whatcom County, cutting grain while the kernels were still soft was prudent because the fall rains could easily flatten a field of grain and make harvest nearly impossible. Shocked grain would still dry and the kernels harden for thrashing.

Born in a real house

My grandmother was not a field worker like my great grandmother. My father was born in the cedar shack, but when my uncle, my father’s younger brother Arnold, was born, they had a new house with plumbing and wired for electricity, which would not be available for a few years. The house was built in 1916. I once saw old invoices from Diamond B, which still exists as Diamond B Constructors, that I think were for plumbing and wiring the house for electricity. Whatcom County Railway and Light Company was active already in 1902, but electricity did not reach the house until the Gus Waschke family had occupied the house for a few years.