(Disclaimer)
For those of you who have not read any of my posts, I like to be metaphoric, so this post even though it really does describe how a person would eat fish-head, it is not necessarily about that at all.
As children we were probably told most of the same things by our parents, the golden rule, wipe your feet, don’t pick your nose, and of course take what you can eat. Most of that stuff is pretty common sense right? Huh. I thought you would say that.
Well, some folks find even those simple little rules difficult to follow, and I am going to be completely honest when I say even I too sometimes don’t like what I have bitten off; and I serve it back to the people around me. As the old saying goes however, don’t bite off more than you can chew ( or want to?). I understand that phrase better, and it is easier to understand if said that way. I have also learned sometimes things in life are just plain hard to swallow, nice pun right?
O.K., I’ve taken care of foreshadowing the metaphor and delivered a pun, now let’s get back to business with the fish-head story. While living in The Bahamas for the past year I met some really great people. They don’t have very much to speak of, that is materialistically speaking they don’t have much. In the islands, if it doesn’t come easy, you don’t need it. These people have learned to live with what they have. It’s not a simple task to get things in the islands and if you can get them, they are very expensive.
My Bahamian friend Gary is poor, and after borrowing fifty bucks from me, he invited me for supper as a way to show his appreciation.
My brain went into some kind of paralysis when I saw supper on the counter looking at the pan it was heading for (bonus pun). I do not know what kind of fish it actually was, all I do know, it was whole. Some of you may find that normal. Not me ewww. He prepared the fish in oil as a type of saute. Green pepper, onion, and garlic were diced and placed inside the gutted body of the creature. I believe the spices he used were simply salt and pepper. Twenty minutes in the pan covered with foil to steam, and they were ready to go. He served it with potatoes, rice, and beans.
We sat in the living room which was also the kitchen, dining room, and a bedroom for his son. We sat next to each other so it was easy for me to watch the procedure for ingesting this meal. When in Rome……,right? I dug in. I started at the tail-fin, the meat fell off the skeleton like perfectly cooked spare ribs; it was delicious. But what about the head? Do you eat it? I thought to myself as Gary began to suck the brains out of his catch, literally. I didn’t do it. I did nevertheless just explain how to by what I saw, and heard, again ewww. I gave my fish-head away to Gary and he smiled pleasantly knowing the food would not go to waste. He never criticized me for not eating the head for I had scarfed down everything else like I had never eaten before and he could tell I enjoyed it.
The moral of the story is this: Some like the head, others like the body, and some like both. However, it is not always pretty, or what we are used to. We have to learn to accept what is served to us and be grateful for one another who serve it.
Thank you Gary for showing me how to eat fish head (really)!
Steven West 