by Langdon Cook
After a second appetizer of soft-shelled crabs—flash-fried in a creole meunière with small cubes of Andouille sausage, a nod to Kevin Davis’s days in the Crescent City—we turned our attention to the main event. Servers passed by at a steady clip with plates of king and sockeye. For Rowley, a wild salmon dinner is just another way of marking time. After college, he continued to chase the fish as a troller and gillnetter, mostly around southeast Alaska; then in 1979 he sold his boat and “worked from the beach,” as he put it, trying to improve what he considered to be the lack of a serious seafood culture on the West Coast compared to other maritime locales where he had spent time—France, for instance, a place where even people of modest means understood what a good piece of fish should look like and how to prepare it.
On the most basic level, Rowley explained, the fish deserve respect. “It’s important that they have every scale,” he said, “because that’s what makes them luminous.” Fish lose scales when they’ve been dropped on deck, stepped on, or otherwise mishandled. “Not only are they beautiful—and it creates a perception of value with the customer—it also tells how the fish have been taken care of, how they’ve been handled.” Handling is in fact paramount. The key is to bleed and ice the fish immediately. “Salmon blood is kind of sticky. It’s not like bleeding cod, when you just sever an artery and all the blood runs out. With salmon you need low-pressure water running through the system. One of the things we figured out was a way to get all the blood out. It results in a cleaner-tasting fish. There’s iron in blood that gives fish an off-taste. The longer it’s in the freezer, the stronger it tastes. I was working with Julia Child at the time. We got Copper River fish in front of her. She said on her show that if we could all eat fish like this, we’d be well-off.” He said it again. “Well-off.” For Rowley, eating good-quality ingredients is the definition of being well-off.
Over the years Rowley had tasted salmon from watersheds up and down the Alaskan coast, had gone so far as to have their fat content tested in a lab. He knew the early-running Copper River kings were some of the fattiest anywhere. Most of these fish ended up at the canneries, and to Rowley this was a crime. “Back then I was very outspoken about quality. I made a lot of friends and a lot of enemies.” One of his friends was a chef named Wayne Ludvigsen, an early proponent of Copper River salmon. Ludvigsen loved the Copper River kings so much, Rowley explained with an impish smile, that his girlfriend left him. “How come you never touch me like that?” she said, catching him in the act of massaging a sumptuous fillet in the kitchen. Rowley approached Ludvigsen and suggested they try to put the Copper River on the map. “I had all this experience behind me, with the fishing and fishermen, and especially with the markets—how to excite people.”
There had never been any fresh fish from the Copper River. It was all going into cans, and a certain amount was frozen and sent to Japan. Rowley talked to some of the fishermen in Cordova. “The farsighted ones were trying to figure out how to change their fishery. They have an airport and the fishing grounds are right there, but they were getting very poor prices.” Still, he met resistance. So he took a different tack and approached a few restaurants in Seattle—McCormick’s Fish House, Ray’s Boathouse, Rosellini’s, stalwarts like that. The thing was, in order to get the salmon down from Alaska back then, it had to be frozen. “We did a tasting at Ray’s Boathouse because they wouldn’t serve frozen fish. I said, ‘Are you willing to do a blind tasting?’ ” The restaurant supplied its usual fresh salmon, and Rowley brought some frozen Copper River fish from Cordova. “We used fillets of the same size and thickness and had Wayne cook them up. It was no contest.” As a result of that tasting, Ray’s Boathouse started serving frozen Copper River salmon in the middle of winter.
Now the problem became one of scale. In order to put Copper River salmon on restaurant menus all over town, the fishery needed to change. The boats weren’t outfitted correctly. Rowley continued to pester the fishermen. “You have to bleed the fish and get it into ice before it goes into rigor mortis,” he told them. A few fishermen decided to risk the change, installing ice holds on their boats and taking the extra time to bleed the catch. The first Copper River fish landed in the fresh market the following year. It was 1983. Rowley picked up four hundred pounds at Sea–Tac in the initial shipment, four boxes, all kings. “It was the first fresh Copper River salmon in Seattle. I bring a box into the kitchen, take the lid off the box…” He folded his arms and looked at me. Hand-delivering this one strain of salmon—the audacity of it all. At Ray’s Boathouse, Chef Wayne Ludvigsen cooked some up, tasted it, and said he needed to serve some to the staff right away. “They put it on the menu. I was there when the waiters started coming back saying, ‘My customers said that was the best salmon they’d ever had.’ ” Rowley’s next customer was Spago.
Fish eaters like Jon Rowley and Kevin Davis have strong opinions about salmon and how to cook it. I know a troller out of Port Townsend, Washington, with forty-two fishing seasons notched in his hull, who has conducted methodical experiments on each species of Pacific salmon to determine the optimum time for eating. He believes a king should stay on ice for a minimum of three days between the time it’s caught and eaten; five to seven days is better, he told me. “A large king cooked the day after catch is the absolute worst,” he explained, calling it “tough, rubbery, with an acrid taste.” But five days later? Then it’s tender and sweet. He figures four days is best for silvers and sockeye, though pinks are soft enough to eat the same day they’re caught. Rigor mortis—the state of stiffening up that a fish, like the rest of us, goes into after dying—plays a pivotal role. Rowley stood up from his seat to show me the difference between a fish that’s in rigor and one that isn’t. He waved his arms up and down like a big goofy bird flapping its wings. Other diners watched him uneasily. The bird routine simulated a fish in rigor, how its flesh tightens up and then releases all at once, herky-jerky, becoming flabby and tasteless. Then he held his arms at his sides and lifted them ever so slightly, more like an orchestra’s conductor on a slow burn. That represented a fish that has passed through the rigor phase properly iced and cared for, how it opens slowly and gracefully, like a good bottle of wine.
The server returned and Rowley ordered a Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. He wanted the Illahe but settled for the Broadley. After the server decanted it, he took a taste and said it was fine, waiting until we were alone before telling me it was a bit jammy for his taste. At last the star of the show appeared. Cherries and almonds spilled over the grilled salmon, and thin medallions of roasted potato poked out from underneath. A few fried basil leaves perched on top. I took my fork to it. A piece flaked off in a single smooth stroke. Though pink on the inside, the salmon was cooked through, I was pleased to see; the trend of undercooking salmon so that its interior is sushi-grade was still alive in some quarters, but thankfully not here. The fillet was crisp on the outside and extra flavorful with some sort of rub. No sooner had I taken a bite than Rowley pronounced it slightly oversalted. He wasn’t convinced by the fruit and nuts either. That was okay. I had expected as much from him. To me, this was just about the best piece of salmon I had ever eaten, though admittedly I was a dilettante next to my white-haired dinner companion.
While Rowley was still consulting for a few handpicked purveyors, such as Taylor Shellfish and Frog Hollow Farm, he wasn’t needed up in Cordova anymore. The Copper River Marketing Association had taken his initial work and built the most famous brand of wild salmon in the world. He was glad for them. Meanwhile, to get a piece of salmon just the way he likes it, he usually cooks it himself. Much of what he had learned over the years about salmon cookery had come from eating with Native Americans. “The Lummis have a whole different way of cooking salmon,” he said, wiping his mouth with a napkin and pushing his plate away. “They have a long cedar stick and they cut the salmon in chunks. It’s just like a giant shish kebab, a javelin with chunks of salmon on it.” The fish are then slow-roasted beside the fire. This was
one of the critical pieces of information Rowley had learned from tribes up and down the coast. Though they had different methods—some filleted the fish and impaled the fillets on sticks that surrounded the fire, while others cut the fish into pieces like the Lummis, and others wrapped the fish in ferns and buried it in coals—the important thing was to cook it slowly at a low temperature so that the fat didn’t burn up all at once. This was the way to get that silky smooth texture and juicy interior. One of the constants he had discovered from eating with various tribes was the heat of the fire and the proximity of the fish to that heat. He figured this out during a eureka moment one night at a tribal salmon bake by simply positioning his open hand next to the flames, as if it were a piece of salmon.
Rowley took a long sip of ice water and replaced his glass carefully on the table. “Thirteen seconds,” he said finally, waiting for me to grasp the significance of the digits. He could keep his hand next to the fire for thirteen seconds before pulling it away from the heat. He paused to let the magic number sink in. “It took me two years to figure out how they do it. I tried to replicate the result in my home kitchen. That thirteen seconds turns out to be about two hundred twenty degrees.” This was just the sort of revelation that I expected from Rowley—that I would expect from anyone who had spent a lifetime hanging around the crossroads of nature and food.
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CHEF DAVIS REAPPEARED FROM his busy kitchen, his face shiny with sweat. He was getting ready to go home for the night so he could see his kids before bedtime. For a second I worried that Rowley would offer him some unsolicited cooking tips. Instead, he made a gesture of tipping his cap. “Wonderful fish,” he said. Davis looked over at me, saw my cleaned plate, and we shook hands. He wanted to know when we might go fishing together. At the end of the day he isn’t just a food guy. He’s a fisherman. One of his other restaurants is called Steelhead Diner, after all. He invited me to join him on the Klickitat, a Columbia River tributary, to which he hoped to sneak off on a slow day in October, or maybe the famed Dean River in British Columbia next year, to spey-fish for wild spring kings.
Davis is also active in fish politics. He even went to Washington, D.C., on behalf of salmon, to voice his opinion on the proposed Pebble Mine, a gold mine that would be excavated by a multinational in the headwaters of Bristol Bay, Alaska, home to the world’s largest run of sockeye salmon. The chef was vehemently opposed to the mine, as was a large coalition of Native Americans, environmentalists, and everyday citizens who valued the last of America’s wild places. A gold mine—the largest on the planet, no less, with a tailings dam the size of Grand Coulee, built in a seismically active area—had no place in that vision. Davis dressed up in a coat and tie for the occasion. Like the rest of the delegation from Trout Unlimited, the nation’s oldest trout-and-salmon-conservation organization, he expected to be handed off to various aides. He was ready for that. The others in his group decided he would be their spokesperson when and if the time came.
And when the time did come, it turned out that Maria Cantwell, junior senator of Washington State, would meet with them in person. Davis’s mouth filled with sawdust. His hands got clammy. “I was nervous,” he told me, even though Cantwell had eaten in his restaurants on numerous occasions. He’d met her before, but this was different. “I didn’t understand the process until that moment, and suddenly I realized how lucky we were.” This was during the lead-up to Obamacare. The halls of Congress bustled with activity unrelated to anything having to do with fish or the environment. Cantwell’s office seemed hot. “When it came time to talk, I couldn’t get the words out. I’m not a public speaker—I’m a cook!” But he finally blurted out his feelings about gold mines, wild fish, and the renewable resources of Alaska, and though Davis worried afterward that he’d botched it, Cantwell would soon announce her opposition to the mine, a move that infuriated the elected officials in neighboring Alaska. “She really stepped up and put her neck out,” Davis marveled. “Other states don’t take kindly to that.” At the same time, the chef and restaurant owner learned something about the political process. “You as a citizen of the United States have a right to request an audience and be heard.” Davis is proud that his voice—and the voices of so many others—has, so far, kept the mine at bay.
That night, when I got home after dinner, my kids were asleep and I found my wife, Martha, reading a newspaper in the kitchen. I told her the Copper River salmon were running, that it was a madhouse at the fish markets and restaurants, that everyone wanted a piece of the action while it lasted. She looked at me, taking this in, and then said, “You know, they found a new planet. It’s forty light-years away. The planet is made of graphite and liquid diamonds.” Pencils and diamonds. I thought about this development for a moment. Every day you can open the paper and read something astonishing about nature, about the universe. I caught myself wondering: How long will it take before we try to mine a diamond planet? Lately there has been a lot of talk about colonizing space, talk that depresses me no end. Our planet, the only one known to have life on it, is nothing short of a miracle. People like Kevin Davis and Jon Rowley understand this. You can’t watch a river boiling with salmon on the spawn—millions of years of evolution distilled into a moment—without being reminded of how miraculous this planet, Earth, really is.
CHAPTER 3
THE CASE OF THE MISSING ADIPOSE FIN
Copper River salmon command today’s name-recognition game, but for hundreds of years, probably longer, the most revered salmon in North America lived nowhere near Alaska. Instead, they returned to the West Coast’s largest river, more than a thousand miles to the southeast. With Kevin Davis’s evaluation of Columbia River spring kings on my mind (“the piece of fish that changed my life”), I went down to the Big River, as it’s known to Native Americans, where it borders the states of Oregon and Washington, following a route that would have been familiar to indigenous fishermen and traders long ago—before a grid of modern highways and interstates crisscrossed the map, their red and blue lines dulling the imagination.
The drive took me east over Snoqualmie Pass to the far side of the Cascade Mountains, lush forests giving way to sagebrush-dotted plateaus, the fresh yellow blooms of balsamroot announcing the season. With a high desert wind at my back, I skirted the Yakama Nation and the volcanic cone of Mount Adams before dropping over the lip of the Columbia River Gorge, where I met a man in a dark cove, pacing restlessly beside his half-beached jet boat. My watch said 5:20 A.M.; I was five minutes late. “Time’s a-wasting,” he said truculently, dispensing with any introductions or greetings.
John, my fishing guide for the day, ushered me aboard his boat before pushing us off the beach. From ankle-deep water, he jumped onto the bow and took the helm. We motored slowly out of the cove into inky darkness. It was disconcerting not being able to see. I checked the time again and looked in the direction of where the sun should be rising. Headlights on the hillside; the sound of a distant train. I poured myself a mug of coffee from my thermos and tried to relax. The beginning of any fishing trip is a confusion of heightened senses and emotions. There’s hope, of course, and also, maybe, a touch of worry. Would I get lucky? Would I go home with the fish that everyone in the know talked about? The best way to sample any cut of fish, after all, is to catch it yourself.
The worthiness of salmon and trout as fishing quarry dates back to Roman times. A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, attributed to a fly-fishing nun named Dame Juliana Berners, was printed in 1496 and contains the sage reminder that an angler suffers no annoyances unless he brings them upon himself. How many times have I needed to remember this bit of wisdom! The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton, first published in England in 1653, is still popular today for its advice and whimsical stories. Since medieval times, the literature of fishing has been a regular feature of the English-language bookshelf. Though many sport anglers on today’s crowded rivers have adopted a catch-and-release ethic to sustain these workhorse fisheries, throughout history the red-f
leshed salmon in particular has been venerated around the temperate world as food, as a gift from the sea, sometimes returning to spawning grounds in eye-popping numbers and enabling entire societies to prosper. From California to Alaska, Native Americans on the West Coast survived largely on salmon. This plenitude allowed the tribes to develop “gift economies,” in which a family’s wealth was measured not by accumulation but by what it could afford to give away, and the reliable food source that swam upriver each year gave them plenty of time to do other things, like tell stories and make art.
These days, many anglers in salmon country don’t think kindly toward the Native American fishery. They see the Indians as competitors for a dwindling resource and decry the nets that catch endangered runs of wild fish. Tensions run high on a place like the Olympic Peninsula, in far northwestern Washington State, a four-hour drive and ferry ride from my home in Seattle. The peninsula was once thought to be sheltered from the forces of civilization that have decimated salmon populations elsewhere, but its famous fish runs are in steady decline. Many blame the Indian nets, none more so than hook-and-line anglers hoping to put a fat salmon in the freezer. The Columbia River Gorge is another place where cultures clash over salmon.
John wore a heavy parka over polyvinyl bibs and rubber boots. The gorge was forecast to warm up to eighty degrees today—the hottest day of spring so far—but at this hour it was cold on the water. He also wore a pair of thin black gloves that fit his hands snugly, like a surgeon’s. These, he explained, while cutting up strips of cured herring by the light of his headlamp, were for masking any human scent as he tied on lures and baits. He handed me a rod with instructions to let out seventy feet of line so we could pull plugs—a type of deep-bodied lure—through the placid waters of Drano Lake.