Uncle Wendell’s Pond

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Before there could be any bass at Uncle Wendell's, there had to be frogs. His place sat on Woodbury Pond in Litchfield, and the frogs lived in the weeds and the soft mud along the shore, where a boy of eight could spend most of a morning wading after them with both hands out and come away with three or four for his trouble. The ones that didn't get away went into a can, and the can went out to the end of the dock.

I don't remember the cast, and I don't remember much of the fight. What I remember is the line going tight all at once and a fish coming up out of that pond bronze and furious, a lot more fish than its size had any right to be, with Uncle Wendell behind me laughing at whatever my face was doing. It wasn't a big bass by anybody's measure but mine. It went home with us and got cooked, and I ate my share of it like I'd brought in supper for the whole family.

It wasn't a big bass by anybody's measure but mine.

That fish started the years when nearly everything I knew about the country around home, I learned at the edge of some piece of water with somebody older than me, and each kind of fish came with its own person. Brook trout came with Grandpa Pottle and the brooks behind the Harvey farm in Litchfield. White perch were Uncle Everett's, out on Cobbosseecontee Stream with my cousin Debby. Salmon meant my dad and Great Pond in Belgrade, and pickerel meant my friend David Plourde and Cole Stream after long days haying on his farm.

None of us gave a thought to how those fish had come to be in that water, and the answers turned out to be as different as the people I fished with. One had been in Maine since the glaciers pulled back. Two were brought in on purpose in the years right after the Civil War. One was native to a single corner of the state and got carried just about everywhere else. I learned all of that decades later, and what follows is each fish the way I knew it then, what I know about it now, and the bottle I'd open for it. Back when I was a kid, whatever fish was on the table came with a cold beer or a Coke. Nobody in my family drank wine.

Bass

Woodbury Pond runs warm and weedy along the shore by midsummer, which is the kind of water bass want, and to anybody standing on that dock it would have looked like bass country forever. It hadn't been. There were no bass anywhere in Maine before 1868. Smallmouth were brought in from New York waters that year, and among the first places they went was Cobbosseecontee Lake, whose shoreline runs through Litchfield and West Gardiner, the same towns where I'd catch mine about a hundred years later. Within a dozen years bass had been planted in lakes across most of Maine's river systems.

The smallmouth isn't even a true bass. It belongs to the sunfish family, the same family as the pumpkinseeds that every kid in Maine has pulled off a dock, which is easy to believe once one has jumped on the end of a line. Out of a cold Maine pond the meat is firm, white and mild, with big flakes and very little fat, and it does well in a hot oven under a layer of buttered crackers.

The pour

Pour a dry Chenin Blanc, and for a good night a Vouvray Sec from the Loire. Chenin has high acidity and a flavor of baked apple and quince, with enough body to stand up to a fillet this firm. The acid does what a squeeze of lemon would do, and it cuts through the butter in a crumb topping. A dry South African Chenin Blanc is the easy one to find and costs less.

At the wine shop, ask for a dry Chenin Blanc, and check that the label doesn't say demi-sec.

Brook trout

Grandpa Pottle fished the brooks behind the Harvey farm with a fly rod and a pipe, and I can't picture him on the water without that pipe smoke drifting back over the alders. He laid a fly down exactly where he meant it to go, and he took the time to teach me how, and I worked at it. The pole I really fished those brooks with, though, was a telescoping one strung with cotton thread, a rig that looked like nothing at all and could go places his couldn't.

The bait came out of the cow pasture. Old cow paddies that had baked hard on top stayed cool and damp underneath, and when one got flipped over with a stick the worms were right there, fat and slow, and a coffee can of them lasted all afternoon. The brooks were narrow enough to step across in places, with alders hanging low over the water, and where the brush closed in too tight for any fly line I could slide that pole in under the branches, let a worm drift down along an undercut bank, and wait.

The brook trout is the one fish in this story that belonged to Maine from the start. It came in behind the glaciers, and it isn't really a trout at all. It's a char, a cousin of the Arctic charr that still hangs on in a dozen deep Maine lakes. Brook trout once ran from Maine down the Appalachians to Georgia, and farms and towns pushed them out of most of that range. Maine now holds about 97 percent of the wild brook trout lakes and ponds left in the species' native range in this country, and in 2005 the Legislature named it a State Heritage Fish.

The trout behind the Harvey farm weren't wild ones. Those brooks were stocked, and they stayed stocked until I was in high school, and after that the trout were gone. The ones we took out of there were small, dark green across the back with red spots ringed in blue and a white edge on the lower fins, and they were sweet and delicate enough that butter in a hot pan was all they ever needed.

The pour

Pour a Chardonnay with only light oak, a Mâcon-Villages from southern Burgundy for every day or a Meursault when the trout are worth celebrating. The body of a Chardonnay matches the butter, and its acidity keeps the pan sauce from feeling heavy. Too much new oak buries a fish this delicate, so steer away from the big buttery style, though plenty of California Chardonnay labeled unoaked or lightly oaked does the job fine and is on most grocery shelves.

Ask the shop for a Mâcon-Villages, or any Chardonnay they'd describe as lightly oaked.

Perch

When Uncle Everett wanted a fish fry, it meant white perch, and it meant my cousin Debby and me in the boat with him on Cobbosseecontee Stream. He'd pick his spot, drop the anchor, and the three of us would start lowering worms over the side, and there wasn't much more to it than that. Some days the perch were so thick that the scent of the worm in the water seemed to be enough, and the line would twitch before the hook had even settled.

In a couple of hours the bottom of the boat would be covered with them, silver and flapping around our sneakers. I believe one day we had close to a hundred, though that number could easily be ten-year-old me doing the counting. Back at the house Uncle Everett fried them up, or when he had a mind to, made a perch stew.

The stream carries the water of the whole Cobbossee chain of lakes down through West Gardiner and into the Kennebec at Gardiner. White perch aren't perch. They're temperate bass, close kin to the striped bass, and they're native to Maine. The state's fisheries biologists have long ranked them among Maine's most important freshwater sport fish, because there are so many of them, they bite so readily and they eat so well.

The meat is white and sweet, with a fine flake, and mild enough to let the cooking decide most of the flavor.

The pour

Pour a Sauvignon Blanc, and for a better bottle a Sancerre from the Loire. Sauvignon Blanc has high acidity and a citrus and green-herb flavor that acts like lemon on fried fish, cutting the oil and waking up a mild fillet. A New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, which nearly every store carries, works just as well. A Vinho Verde from northern Portugal is lighter, a little spritzy and very cheap, and it's made for a pile of small fried fish. For the stew, the milk and butter want the rounder Mâcon-Villages from the trout section.

Ask the shop for a Loire Sauvignon Blanc. Touraine Sauvignon is the everyday one and Sancerre is the step up.

Landlocked salmon

Salmon was my dad. We fished Great Pond in Belgrade out of our Grumman canoe with a small Evinrude clamped on the back, and Great Pond is a lot of open water to be out on in an aluminum canoe. When the wind came up, and it usually did, the fishing got hard in a hurry and most of the effort went into keeping the bow pointed where it belonged.

We rarely caught a salmon, and I can't say it ever bothered either of us much. Those days were a reason to be somewhere with my dad, the same as the day trips we took up to Rangeley Lake in the old blue Scout with the canoe tied on the roof.

Years later I learned that Great Pond had a claim to fame I'd never heard about in the canoe. Ernest Thompson spent his boyhood summers there, and it became the setting for his play On Golden Pond, even though the movie was filmed in New Hampshire.

The salmon we were after had a longer story than the pond. Landlocked salmon are Atlantic salmon that stopped going to sea at the end of the last Ice Age, and in Maine they lived in only four lake systems: Sebago, Sebec, West Grand and Green Lake. The first stocking outside those waters came in 1868, the same year as the bass, and today Maine's Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife counts more than 300 lakes with a salmon fishery. Every salmon my dad and I didn't catch on Great Pond was there because somebody carried its ancestors there. Maine made the landlocked salmon its state fish in 1969.

When one does come to the boat, a landlocked salmon is the richest fish in Maine's fresh water, with pink-orange flesh and enough fat to stand up to a grill or a broiler without drying out.

The pour

Pour a dry rosé, and for a good night a Bandol rosé from Provence. Rosé has the red-berry fruit to meet a fish this rich and the acidity of a white wine to cut its fat, and it has no tannin to turn metallic against the oil. A light Pinot Noir, served a little cool, does the same job, and a dry rosé from Provence or California is in most grocery stores.

Ask the shop for a dry rosé. Côtes de Provence is the everyday one and Bandol is the step up.

Pickerel

Pickerel came after work. I hayed all day on my friend David Plourde's farm for five dollars, back in the seventies when five dollars still meant something to a kid, and when the last load was in, David and I would head down to Cole Stream with a can of worms, sunburned and still itching from the chaff. Cole Stream feeds into Cobbosseecontee Stream a mile or two below where we fished it. Once in a while one of us caught a bass, and every so often a brook trout, but nearly every fish that came out of Cole Stream was a pickerel.

They lay still in the weeds like sticks, and when a worm drifted past one it hit hard enough to nearly take the rod out of my hand. They came up long and green with a mouth full of teeth, and getting the hook back meant keeping my fingers well clear of the front end.

The chain pickerel takes its name from the dark lines across its green sides, which link up like a chain. Maine's fisheries biologists think it was native only to the southwestern corner of the state, and people carried it from pond to pond until it spread across most of the southern half. By the time David and I were fishing for them, pickerel had been in those streams so long that nobody we knew would have guessed they hadn't always been.

What kept a lot of people from keeping pickerel was the bones. Each fillet carries a row of small Y-shaped bones, and the old ways around them were to score the fillets deep so the bones fry crisp, or to cook the fish whole and flake the meat off for fish cakes. Past the bones, the meat is white, firm and sweet, as good as anything that swims in Maine's fresh water.

The pour

Pour a Grüner Veltliner from Austria, and for a good night a Wachau Federspiel, the crisper of the Wachau's two top styles, which suits fried cakes better than the heavier Smaragd. Grüner has high acidity, citrus and a little white pepper, and that pepper meets the onion and seasoning in a fish cake while the acid cuts through the frying. If the shop has no Grüner, a crisp Pinot Grigio or a Sauvignon Blanc works fine.

Ask the shop for an Austrian Grüner Veltliner. The liter bottles are fine for a fish fry.

I haven't fished any of that water in a long time. The brooks behind the Harvey farm haven't held a trout since I was in high school, and I'd guess the frogs at Uncle Wendell's have had a lot of peace since I left. If I went back, I'd want a telescoping pole and a can of worms, and I'd keep an eye out for a cow pasture on the way.

Who took you fishing the first time? Tell me in the comments.

The recipes

None of these asks for much beyond a hot pan, a little butter and a bottle open before the fish comes out. As with the wild game and game bird recipes, my starting point is Marjorie Standish's Cooking Down East, and these eight are my own. Two of them are for fish that didn't come up in the story, hornpout and togue, since both turned up on plenty of Maine tables. Cook fish until it flakes and reads 145°F in the thickest part.

Don't fish? Most of these fish are never sold in stores, so cook with what is. Farmed rainbow trout stands in for brook trout. Walleye or yellow perch fillets, sold frozen in a lot of stores, work for the bass, the perch and the pickerel cakes. Use farmed Atlantic salmon or Arctic char for the landlocked salmon, Arctic char for the togue, and farm-raised catfish for the hornpout, which is a catfish itself. The wines stay the same.

Sources: Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, black bass, landlocked salmon, white perch and chain pickerel species management plans and the wild brook trout program; Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture assessment as reported by the Portland Press Herald; Portland Monthly and the Belgrade Historical Society on Ernest Thompson and Great Pond.