Oh, the Shame of It

I’m embarrassed for my freezer. It’s pathetic, or it was. So much in and around the house that needs attention after the harsh winter just past. Where do I start? Then I opened the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and it screamed. 

A frozen wasteland. A scene from “Dr. Zhivago.” The coldest, most uncomfortable day of the winter, heavy clothes strewn about the house, wet boots, the rattle of the furnace, an old, leaky window — all of it was before me when I opened the freezer door, a diorama of the winter of 2015. I closed it.

No, I can’t shut it in. Like the gutters and eaves, the empty bags of rock salt, a bag of garbage, a pile of ash from the wood stove, all that remained invisible under the snow until now, the freezer demanded I open the door and deal with the shame that came in two forms.

First the contents: I extracted from beside a stack of three ice cube trays, a slice of pizza in a frost-filled plastic bag (it had turned into an artifact from an ancient civilization), two plastic bags containing clam bait left over from a porgy expedition, probably still serviceable. I put them aside.

From deep in the back, I pulled a plastic container of chili. I think it was chili, or chowder. No, chili. I’m pretty sure I saw beans through the frost. Old beans. Then came a rumpled plastic Zip­loc with something black inside, and along with it the second, more intense wave of shame.

Do you know the verb “to put up”? Like my mother, my Aunt Ethelyn was a farm girl, but unlike my mother Ethelyn remained upstate her entire life, in Chittenango to be exact. She was a gardener, no, a farmer. Her garden was too big to be called a garden. In the fall, she “put up” the vegetables she’d grown, jars and jars and jars of green beans, yellow beans, carrots, a cornucopia of veggies stored in her basement, lined up on shelves “as neat’s a pin,” as she would have put it.

The black thing in the Ziploc — for shame — was a black sea bass I’d caught off Gardiner’s Island at the end of last summer. It had not been put up. It was bagged and thrown into the Frigidaire. It was crumpled, and freezer-burned, a crippled, inedible reminder of that fine day the fish was caught. Such a wasteful injustice to the waters of Gardiner’s Bay. I swore upon the frozen sea bass carcass to right the wrong and put my freezer in order.

All Montaukers recognize the great irony of living on a peninsula surrounded by the bountiful Atlantic with a hometown commercial fishing industry and yet living for months at a stretch without access to fresh fish. Sure, a lot of us have “connections,” and there’s Duryea’s and the Gosmans’ wholesale market if they’re not frozen shut, but no proper fish market. There are complex reasons for this that I won’t go into now. It’s beside the point.

Which is, at least in my case, a feast-in-summer, famine-in-winter mentality that is totally unnecessary. I’m going to buy a chest freezer, and I’ve already begun to seek out those in the community who know how to freeze fish. Keeping fish so that when it’s defrosted it has kept its juices and flavor is an art.

I caught up with Capt. Skip Rudolph and his wife, Vicki Ridgeway, at the Naturally Good store on Monday afternoon. Skip runs the Adios charter boat and — this might sound funny — he cares for fish. Not all fishermen do. I asked him, did he put up fish for the winter? A strange question to ask a fisherman with an endless supply of fresh fish in season? No. Skip has little more access to the fresh stuff during the winter than the rest of us. He said yes, he did put up fish, and that he’d found the best way to do it. I’m all ears.

Most people know that air is the enemy of anything frozen. Air left in a freezer bag sucks the moisture out of whatever’s been frozen. You can bag a piece of fish, then lower the bag into water to force the air out before sealing it. Another method is to freeze fish in a brine. I’ve had some luck with this, but if left in the freezer too long, brine-frozen fish becomes soggy when thawed.

No, the ideal way to freeze fish is to vacuum seal it with one of those FoodSaver vacuum systems. There are other brands, but they all work by totally eliminating air from the freezer bag. They cost anywhere from $100 to $200. Skip Rudolph told me that as good as the vacuum sealers are, there is a refinement he strongly recommends.

He said that in a sense the vacuum machines worked too well. That is, they tend to suck moisture out of the fish as they remove the air. To counteract this, Skip first wraps the fish in a piece of plastic wrap, then places it in the vacuum bag and into the machine. It was as though the fish put up in this way were thawed back to life, he said, going on to extol the qualities of black sea bass, as a species, a food, and as one of his charters’ favored target species.

That’s it. No more fishless winter dinners. I vow to put up fish that I catch (striped bass, porgies, sea bass, blackfish, and bluefish) and fish (bluefish mostly) doomed to waste by surfcasters who treat them like footballs to be kicked back into the suds in order to quickly get their lure out to catch the preferred striper. I will walk the beaches begging bluefish, get FoodSaver to sponsor me, feed the needy — sorry, getting carried away, but waste not, want not is the point.

What about that bag of clam bait? Do you think I could make a chowder?