Have you ever seen pike on the menu in an Irish restaurant? Or perch? There's perhaps one reason for the lack of pike in recent years - it's protected now. An angler may take only one a day from lake or river. They don't look pretty, but the other night on BBC or some other channel, a cookery star was serving up pike to the British public.
Some people explain that you don't eat a predator fish, but how many fishermen, knocking their newly caught trout on the head, have seen a fingerling trout, or better, pop out of its mouth? So pike is seldom, if ever, on the menu here. If there is a dissident voice, we will no doubt hear it. But on to perch. Now these are not protected in the same way.
You may eat as many as you catch. But, as we read in a lyrical piece in this news paper of Friday, written by Andy Barclay, recounting the piscatorial experience of himself and his eight year old son Ben in Cavan and Monaghan, every perch they caught was carefully landed, admired and then put back into the water. And in his first expedition, Ben caught no less than 35 perch. Some of them were over a pound in weight.
There is no bar to keeping them, and people do eat perch; but not here. Any visitor knows that in Geneva and around the lake, and possibly farther afield, the dish of the day is often filet de perche. The perch may now come from South America or the Baltic or wherever, but the Genevese and the tourists expect to get filet de perche when they want them. There was a time when we used to sell them perch that had been cleared out of a trout lake. Possibly in the olden days of the Inland Fisheries Trust, and those that were unsold might be found in heaps around certain lakes.
Now, it seems, coarse fish angling is a big draw, far out stripping, as far as foreign tourists are concerned, the game fish. As to eating perch, there is no doubt that they are bony. In which case, if you get a reasonable specimen of a pound or more, you simply slice a fillet off each side, and that's what you'll get when you go abroad to places where they value the delicate taste which we reject - or just don't know about.
On to very flavoury fish. Arthur Reynolds, regular correspondent and old friend, arrives up with a bag of mackerel caught hardly more than an hour before. The secret here is to split then, lightly sprinkle with tabasco sauce or even angostura hitters, then grill. They thus lose some, but not too much, of their fat. Brilliant.