No doubt in idle moments of Covid-19 quarantine, your thoughts have turned, as did mine, to this question: Are the blowfish that live in Florida waters the same as the fugu that are eaten with great ceremony in Japan? And now it can be told. Yes. Yes, they are.
They’re all Tetraodontidae, which means
they have four big ol’ teeth that can crunch through shells, and almost all
have tetradotoxin, which, according to Cuteness.com (Really.
Cuteness.com has lots of info about blowfish.) is more than a thousand times as
poisonous as cyanide, and one fish-worth can kill 30 people. And my brothers
and I used to eat the meat with some regularity. Well, maybe that’s not the
best word. Frequency? Anyway, we ate it, and we lived.
In
Japan, chefs train for three years to be allowed to serve fugu. They learn to
trim off the skin and scoop out the innards without puncturing anything. The
poisonous bits get their own trash bowl. And people pay hundreds of dollars to
eat slices of raw fish so thin they look smeared on the plate, or crispy fried
chunks. A character in a novel I read said that eating fugu made the diner feel
high, because he had skated so close to death and come through alive. That’s
assuming he did come through alive.
Here
in Florida, you can hardly avoid catching blowfish in places like the Banana
River on the east coast. The Air Force base where my father was stationed had a
boathouse where officers could check out a modest fishing boat for free.
Remember that phrase. When we kids were there for summer visits, he’d take us
fishing. Fish were free food. We caught from angelfish to zebrafish. (At least
that’s what we called them. They weren’t the cute little aquarium fish that turn
up on a Web search.) And whiting. I think we had that right. They’re common and
OK to eat. And, of course, abundant blowfish.
As
oldest sibling, my brother got the job of cleaning the fish at the kitchen
sink. He snipped the tails into zigzag points or little scallops. And he got
his fugu training. It didn’t take three years. It was, “Here’s the knife, here
are the utility scissors, don’t punch a hole in the liver.” Three seconds
maybe? The graduation speech: “Yes, it’s poison, but I think it will be all
right.”
The
edible bit of the blowfish is two ovoid shapes on either side of the body,
looking like chicken oysters. I had to look up the name, but chicken oysters
are the yummy round bits in indentations on the back of the chicken, usually overlooked in
carving. You can pop them out with your thumb, and do they ever taste good. The
blowfish blobs are pale grayish and have a network of tiny veins on the
surface. They taste like… frog legs, maybe. No matter how hard you try, frog
legs do not taste like chicken.
My
husband’s family fished at every opportunity. They were probably within a mile
of our boat on every outing. His father told them to throw the blowfish back.
Then one day they were at the home of an alcoholic cousin who went about
preparing for them, with his shaking hands, a nice mess of blowfish. My future
father-in-law kept quiet, the boys ate the blowfish, and everybody lived.
Fugu
still kills a few hundred people in Japan each year, supposedly because of
uncertified rogue chefs. I guess they charge less. But you wouldn’t eat their
fugu any more than my adolescent brother’s or my husband’s alcoholic cousin’s. You
wouldn’t, would you? It’s been 60 years
since I ate Banana River blowfish, and I feel like running out to get my
stomach pumped. The thrill of having avoided death is way overrated. Anyone for
a burger?
