The Mast-Head: Don’t Call It Trash

It turns out that sea robin are fine to eat. Very fine, in fact, which is good, since my son, Ellis, has suddenly become a fishing fanatic. Sea robin have taken over the shallows near our house on Gardiner’s Bay, and for a kid just learning to cast a rod, they hit the lure with satisfying dependability and put up just enough fight to be interesting. There also seems to be an inexhaustible supply.

This past Saturday, Ellis and I stopped at a yard sale in the trailer park at Ditch Plain and bought him a blue spinning rod and matching reel. Back at the bay, Ellis reeled up sea robin with nearly every cast, filling a red plastic bucket.

Turning to the internet for help, I looked up how to clean them; the best how-to came from England, where a man with very big hands demonstrated his technique. It’s fairly simple: You cut down either side of the dorsal fins to free the skin, then cut just through the sea robin’s spine just behind its head, but not all the way so the head doesn’t come off. Instead, the head becomes a handle, and you can use it to carefully pull the skin off the tail portion — where all the meat is. After that, it is a simple matter of cooking them on the bone or slicing off fillets.

I had intended to adapt a New York Times recipe for sweet and hot shrimp, but getting home late on Monday, there was only time for the basics: a dusting with adobo, garlic powder, and flour and a quick saute in a cast-iron pan with canola oil. They were spectacularly good, with much more flavor than striped bass but free of the oiliness that bothers some people about bluefish.

Traditional trash fish, like sea robin, make some of the best eating. Then there are fish once held in low regard that are undergoing makeovers, such as the porgy, which, in the kitchens of some restaurant chefs, is being rebranded as Montauk sea bream. The fact that so-called trash fish are easy for kids to catch makes it all the better.