How to Cook for Catfish

The locals eat a lot of Vienna sausages around here, don't they? I asked the counter staff at a little general store in Henderson, Louisiana. There were shelves and shelves of these tiny canned hot dog sausages. Cher, they're catfish bait, he replied, laughing. Apparently, these bottom-dwelling fish love Vienna sausages along with chicken livers, oatmeal mushed into balls, chunks of stinky cheese, fried plantains, white bread, canned corn, the head and innards of fiddlers, spam, a mix of cornflakes and strawberry Jell-O, salt-dried minnows, marshmallows, horse leeches, nightcrawlers, egg noodles, cookie crumbs mashed with fish innards, peanut butter, gummy worms, squid, or sardines.

A hungry catfish will eat almost anything, even if it's not its natural diet. Oncem, someone found a plastic tampon applicator inside the gut of one fish. In November 2023, a 12-year-old boy from Oak Grove in Louisiana caught a 114-pound blue catfish in the Mississippi River near Lake Providence , a possible state record. "I think the thing that done it was eating Vienna sausages (as bait)," he said. The fish weighed four pounds more than he did and had to be weighed at the local scrap iron place. ( I feel kind of sad because it'll be too tough to eat and, therefore, died in vain.)

Fishing forums offer recipes for dyeing your Viennas red to make them more attractive. Cut them up, place them in a Mason jar, and add a packet of Cherry Kool-Aid and a generous scoop of garlic powder. Let them get stinky. Do I use sugar-free Kool-Aid, someone asks. Apparently yes, you can. Use a bait needle to thread the line through the middle of the sausage before tying on the hook, says another; it'll stop them from getting mushy and falling off. Crawfish also like Viennas.

The comparative merits of different flavours of Vienna were also debated. One fisherman told of the success he'd had with the jalapeño kind. This made me think about a hook baited with these plus fried plantains. Cajuns eat well, so it's perfectly reasonable that their catfish prey do too. Think of it as a Death Row meal.

A Nebraskan sings the praises of Wimmers and Fairbury hot dogs that are already dyed red. The Wimmers are spicier, and the catfish seem to prefer them, they say. According to Skillet Dawg, three things taste better on a riverbank than anywhere else in the world: Vienna sausages, mustard sauce sardines, and soda crackers. I quite like Viennas; they are not the worst thing I have ever eaten. You're either a canned hot dog person or you're not.

Most Southern cookbooks will have recipes that use catfish as do sites like Louisiana Cooking. It's pretty much impossible to find American catfish in the UK, so we have to use a substitute—unless you're happy to use Vietnamese basa (pangasius)– though there have been major concerns about the welfare and environmental costs associated with basa farming.

I've heard wolf fish is a good approximation. I sometimes use plaice, which has a similar flaky sweetness although it does not hold its shape as well.

Some favourite recipes that use catfish:

I love the Fried Catfish for Ellen in Melissa Martin's Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes From Disappearing Bayou. The batter is flavoured with hot sauce, yellow mustard and cayenne and enriched with egg yolks.

Paul Prudhomme's offers Fried Catfish with Hushpuppies, a traditional pairing found all over the South in his book, Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen. The book is widely available from secondhand sites and bookstores.

Asha Gomez's food is a interesting melding of her Southern Indian heritage and the American Deep South. Her cookbook, My Two Souths, has three catfish recipes: Pickled Catfish, a recipe she developed for a Southern Foodways Alliance lunch at the invitation of John T. Edge which cleverly references the American South's love of pickled anything (including shrimp- a fave of mine) and the Keralan tradition of preserved fish; Catfish Grilled in Banana Leaf with Watermelon Rind Chow-Chow, and a Fishwife's Pie spiced with Old Bay and mustard seeds.

The Catfish Étouffée in Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking by Toni Tipton Martin is stellar. This rendition of an original recipe by Ethel Dixon is, she says, "classic Louisiana country cooking...a brick-red, roux-based gravy ordinarily swimming with swamp crawdads or shrimp from the bayou and served over rice. But Dixon substituted mild-tasting catfish." Tipton-Martin has a new desserts cookbook out next autumn (2027) which I am really looking forward to although I doubt you'll find catfish recipes inside.

Janis Owens offers us a Catfish Stew in her cookbook The Cracker Kitchen via her uncle Gene who would cook this melange of catfish, onions, potatoes, tomatoes and bacon seasoned with catsup and hot sauce over a campfire. She calls it "the Cracker equivalent to Manhattan Chowder." Pat Conroy wrote the book's introduction, calling it "the best cookbook on central Florida since Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote 'Cross Creek Cookery.'" Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock's far more refined recipe for Catfish Stew can be found in their book,  The Gift of Southern Cooking: Recipes and Revelations from Two Great Southern Cooks by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock. NPR have published it here.

Catfish were plentiful in the Lac des Allemandes close to where Nancy Tregre Wilson grew up on Louisiana's Cote Des Allemandes, and in the Mississippi itself and everyone had a pecan tree in their yard, she writes in her cookbook Mémère's Country Creole Cookbook: Recipes and Memories from Louisiana's German Coast. Hence her recipe for pecan-crumbed, fried catfish. It is so good.

I encourage you to spend some time in Henderson should you find yourself in this part of Louisiana. Buy your boudin from nearby Best Stop Cajun Market at 1008 Smede Hwy and eat it in the car, squeezed onto saltines with a smidgeon of pepper jelly.

Sadly, our favourite Henderson dancehall, Whiskey River Landing, has shut but there remain many others, all home to remarkable Zydeco and Cajun musicians who play to packed audiences, mainly local. Henderson is one of the best places to explore the Atchafalaya Basin (260,oo0 acres of cypress-tupelo swamps) and eat real-deal Cajun food. When we last visited Henderson back in 2018 we met Dee Broussard, matriarch and Cajun grandmomma to most of south Louisiana it seemed and a 'damn fine Cajun cook' although she had to ask her own grandmomma to teach her after her mother served up Gumbo 'like dishwater.' Salty of tongue but kind with it, she swore like a good 'un and laughed then cried as she talked of the son she lost last year, and the husband who took her dancing who had at that time been gone some 5 years. Highly illuminating about the Cajun culture, we chatted in French and I got to hear the distinctive Cajun accent in full flow. Dee is very specific about who is Cajun and who is not ("those Charles River people call themselves Cajun but they ain't") and the need to protect and develop their unique culture. Dee remembers being punished by teachers for speaking Cajun French, a big part of the reason why this unique language very nearly died out.

She only started going back to this dance hall in the last few months before we met her; watching others dance brings both pleasure and pain (Dee is diabetic and has trouble walking.) She told us one of her daughters asked her if she was gonna meet a 'new friend.' "Cher," she said "the men here so old, they'd have to drink three root beers then I'd have to stand on my head so they could drop it in." We all howled. Dee's family ran Whiskey River Landing and her young niece, one of the bartenders and a single mom to three kids, hunted alligators with a crossbow, selling them for meat. She took a shine to my husband and offered to take him out 'gator hunting', telling him she had "three bodies in her freezer," then turned her back on me. We hoped they weren't the corpses of her previous conquests. When we left, three sheets to the wind with overstrained vocal chords, Dee enjoyed an escort of three men to help her to her car which turned out to be a massive SUV. These Cajun women love men. She took out her rosary ("this is my abortion rosary, I pray for all the babies", she said and no, I decided to not ask her about that), said she'd pray for us every day and remember us all the days of her life but perhaps she "might need a bigger rosary and more time" to do the job correctly, "us being Protestant 'n all". She then took off up the levee in a cloud of oyster shell dust. Can you see why I find this part of the world so compelling?

Ian McNulty wrote about Whisky River in his excellent book Louisiana Rambles: Exploring America's Cajun and Creole Heartland.

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