Noodling for Flatheads by Burkhard Bilger

Author:Burkhard Bilger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Culture
Publisher: SCRIBNER
Published: 2000-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

The Mall of the Wild

KEN HOLYOAK ’S fish hatchery, frog farm, and wild hog preserve sits on a small gravel drive guarded by a very large fish. Eight feet long and six feet high, bristling with exotic fins and fluorescent purple-and-yellow scales, the fish looks like a cross between a bluegill and a beetle—a Volkswagen Beetle, that is, circa 1969—and hovers above passing cars as if scanning for minnows. Even Holyoak doesn’t recognize its species. “I just asked this feller that goes to my church to make me a feesh,” he says, “and that’s what he come up with.”

Such a fish might make a splash in any setting, but in Holyoak’s part of the country it has the quality of a vision. On every side, Georgia’s coastal plain stretches to the horizon in a weary ostinato, its peanut fields and forests repeating endlessly from the swamps of Florida to the hills of Alabama. Twisted oaks and linear pines sit so far back from the highway that the sky seems to engulf them, and the locals have little interest in raising the skyline. Alapaha, the closest town, has no visible sign of industry and only one restaurant—one so secretive that I drove past it three times without seeing it, though I was famished at the time. But then there is Holyoak’s fish: a thing both of the landscape and monstrously out of place; a blazing seraph, come to warn you of man’s indignities to nature. Or maybe just to sell you a few hybrid bass.

One day, while researching the country’s ballooning aquaculture industry, I came upon a press release from a group called the Future Frog Farmers of America (FFFA). “Move Over Chickens!” it declared. “Here Come the Bud Boys!” After thirty-five years and a million dollars of investment, Ken Holyoak had finally grasped the slipperiest of holy grails: a way to mass-produce frogs. “Anyone who is remotely familiar with bullfrogs realizes immediately that frogs are discriminate feeders,” the release said. But Holyoak had taught his frogs to eat food that didn’t move, and he had a patented system for growing them with little or no manual labor. Thanks to his techniques, frog farms might soon spread across the country like the poultry industry. “Ken still has to pinch himself to make sure he is not dreaming . “No! He is not dreaming anymore! It is Bullfrog Reality!”

This was news to me. I knew that frog gigging is an old southern tradition, and I’d grown up with kids who still caught their family dinner, on occasion, with a flashlight and a forked stick. But I also knew that frog legs have never quite made the leap into mainstream American cooking. As a chef I know put it: “A frog is either lowbrow or highbrow. If you catch it, it’s low. If you order it in a French restaurant, it’s high.”

The FFFA promised to change all that. Frog demand, they insisted, is a function of frog supply. The United States imports 3,800

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