The regional table / Arkansas
Pan-Fried White River Trout
There were no trout in the White River until the Corps of Engineers put two dams across it and began letting the water out of the bottom of the lakes.
On 13 July 1950 the Newspaper Enterprise Association filed a dispatch from Forsyth, Missouri, which the Athens Banner-Herald printed in Georgia under the headline "Uncle Sam Plans To 'Flood Out' The White River". The lede is one sentence long: "Uncle Sam's going to flood out the river." The reporter had gone up to Forsyth to watch the float-trip guides work while there was still a river to float on. The guide, he wrote, labours only on the way home — going down he lets the boat drift while he shows his customers where to catch them, and he brings the poles, the bait, the food and a tent for overnight. What the customers were catching he sets down as a list: "people who want to catch a nice string of bass, pike, bluegill or a mess of catfish the easy way". The town's hundred and ninety residents had already sold their land to the government and picked out a new site for Forsyth on Shepherd of the Hills Mountain, two and a half miles west and up. Asked about the float trips, they told him they were still going on, at least for the rest of that summer. That is what the White River was: bass, pike, bluegill and catfish, written down by a man standing on the bank. Norfork Dam on the North Fork tributary had been finished in 1944 and Bull Shoals on the main stem was finished in 1951, both of them built and run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for flood control and hydroelectric power — the dates are from two U.S. Geological Survey reservoir studies, Water-Resources Investigations Report 03-4077 on Bull Shoals Lake and 02-4250 on Norfork Lake, both written by Joel Galloway and Reed Green with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. The NEA man was told the dam was to go up the following spring, eighty miles downstream; the Survey dates its completion to 1951. Either way he had the last summer of it.
The dam drowned the river above it and chilled the river below it, and the second thing is why this recipe exists. Bull Shoals Lake is about 63 metres deep at the dam and the conservation pool stands at 199.3 metres above the 1929 datum, but the release structure sits at 163 metres: the water that leaves the dam is taken from roughly thirty-six metres, a hundred and twenty feet, down in the dark. The Geological Survey gauges what comes out, at station 07054501, White River at Bull Shoals Dam near Flippin. Across its record the monthly mean water temperature in June is 9.2 degrees Celsius and in July 10.4 — 49 and 51 degrees Fahrenheit, in an Arkansas July. An hour away, Big Creek at Carver, a tributary of the undammed Buffalo, has only a few years of record and only one July in it, and that July mean is 27.3 degrees, 81 Fahrenheit. Thirty degrees Fahrenheit of difference between two Ozark streams, one of which has a dam in it. Nothing on the 1950 list can live in the outflow, and trout can, so trout were put there and are still being put there: the Fish and Wildlife Service opened Norfork National Fish Hatchery in 1957, by its own account to raise trout for restocking areas hit by dam construction, and it supplies the tailwaters below Norfork and Bull Shoals to this day. It has to. Pender and Kwak, reporting in the Transactions of the American Fisheries Society in 2002, found that brown trout reproductive success in the White River tailwater reaches is highly variable, "resulting in the need for supplemental stocking", and the rainbows are hatchery fish from the day they go in. This is a manufactured fishery in a river that was taken away from somebody, and it is worth knowing that while you eat one. No old book holds the measurements below; they were worked out for this page.
Why this version works
Buttermilk first, then cornmeal. Fish skin offers a crust almost nothing to hold on to. A dip in buttermilk leaves a film of milk protein and acid over the whole fish, and the meal grips that rather than the skin. The browning then happens in the coating, on milk sugars and milk protein, so the crust colours well before the fish inside is anywhere near done — which is exactly the order you want on a fish that needs eight minutes.
The bone is the reason it works at all. A pan-dressed trout is about an inch thick at the shoulder and tapers to nothing; the two fillets cut off the same fish are half an inch. Whole, the skeleton is a frame that holds the flesh flat and still while the proteins set, so nothing curls, tears or slides off the slice. It also gives the heat something to travel through rather than straight across: the fish cooks inward from both flanks towards the backbone and arrives at one moment, instead of a thin sheet of muscle going from raw to dry in the time it takes to turn it.
You can tell it is done without opening it. Take the dorsal fin between finger and thumb and pull straight up. On a raw or underdone fish it resists and tears; on a cooked one it lifts free in one piece with the little cluster of bones at its base, because the connective tissue anchoring them has let go. The eye backs it up: it turns from clear to opaque white and stands proud of the socket. If you want a number, push an instant-read probe in at the shoulder behind the head, keeping clear of the backbone — the FDA Food Code of 2022 sets fish at 63 degrees Celsius, 145 Fahrenheit, held fifteen seconds, in section 3-401.11.
The skin is the wrapper, so leave it closed. Trout skin is thin, unscaled and full of collagen, and all the way round the fish it is an unbroken envelope. Fry it whole and the cavity fills with its own steam while the outside crusts. That is also why nothing goes inside: a cavity packed with lemon and herbs insulates the thickest part of the fish from the pan and turns eight minutes into twelve, by which time the shoulder is dry.
