Papaw was a serious fisherman. After he retired, he went fishing nearly every day except Sundays. When he died, Mama found calendars in his old WWII foot locker that had a count of every fish he caught every day for years. I remember him coming home from fishing with a long stringer of fish, mostly crappie with a few catfish mixed in. He would carry them to the backyard where he had set up an old table for cleaning fish. I would watch as he used his electric knife to fillet all the fish, and then we would bury the carcasses in a big hole far out near the back fence. Mimi would freeze the fish.
When the outside freezer was completely full of fish fillets, we would have a fish fry. My mom and dad and I would come over, along with other family and some friends from church. Papaw would set up a huge cauldron of oil on the backporch for frying the fish that Mimi breaded in cornmeal. He would sit by the fryer, smoking a cigar, talking with the other men. Inside, Mimi would make the hushpuppies. Full of onions, she would tell me; that was the secret. She would scoop the batter with a spoon and drop each one into boiling oil on the stove. When the hushpuppy was ready, it would pop brown and round to the top of the oil and float there. She scooped them out and let them drip on a plate with paper towels.
I am absolutely sure that Mimi served other food with the fish and hushpuppies, but try as I might, I cannot remember any of it. I cannot remember who all came or what they talked about. The fish and hushpuppies, the way they tasted and the way they were prepared, overshadowed everything else, and when I eat them now at a restaurant, I always think of Papaw and his cigar on the backporch and of Mimi fishing floating hushpuppies out of a saucepan.
