I'm weird about salmon--I can't stand fresh salmon but I liked the salmon patties my mother made from the canned stuff when I was a kid. I never make those but occasionally I make tuna patties.
I've tried making salmon patties as an adult. Now I don't like them. Either the recipe's not right or my taste buds have changed. I will eat crab cakes!!
I can remember my mom and dad telling me about sturgeon fishing in the Kootenai River near Bonners Ferry, Idaho (which is about 30 miles south of the Canadian Border). Mom said that they used huge hooks and strung line out in the river, as opposed to fishing for them with fishing tackle. Since some of them were larger than a human being, it makes sense that they would need some kind of cable or heavy rope set-up to catch the sturgeon. Back then, it was used just like deer, or any other meat, to be stored for winter use when the river was too frozen over to fish in. I think they still allow sturgeon fishing in some places, but only within certain length requirements, so you can’t catch any that are too large or too small. Here is a picture of old time sturgeon fishing in the Kootenai.
It's an interesting subject. The don't spawn until they are 15-20 years old, so you can see how fishing would decimate the species (actually, there are 27 or so species.) I guess that's why their caviar is so expensive...they gotta survive for 2 decades before they lay their first batch of eggs. I look at fish like that & wonder how anybody could eat them. That holds true for all the bony fish (carp, pike, etc.) I guess if you're hungry enough...
I eat a lot of salmon and shrimp, scallops occasionally, lobster, crab, cod, white fish. I do like trout but don't like boning it. Stopped eating tuna due to the mercury level in it. Used to eat haddock and halibut a lot until I got a bad piece at a local grocer and haven't trust it since.
I am surprised at all y'all in Texas and the south calling them salmon patties. I never had a salmon patty in Texas but did eat a lot of salmon croquettes
We couldn't afford salmon croquettes, so we just had salmon patties. I bet you had pommes frites with yours, too.
I think they were considered somewhat of a trash fish but I really loved smoked suckers. The real name of the fish, I believe, was redhorse, but they were generally referred to as suckers in the UP of Michigan. They could only be fished by spearing, which was way more fun than fishing with a pole. I don't know of anyone preparing them any way other than smoking them, but they were very good that way. My uncle had built a smoker out of an old refrigerator. Another fish that I liked was fried smelt. Smelt were tiny fish that ran in the streams and rivers in the spring, including the small river that ran behind our house. The smelt ran at about the same time of the year as the suckers, but the smelt were fished with a net, while the suckers were fished with a spear. If you caught some suckers in your net while smelt fishing, you were supposed to release them, but I know people (I won't mention any names) who would spear the suckers they caught in a net and keep them. Actually, the smelt were so thick when they were running that it was possible to get all that you wanted in five or ten minutes. Although small, they were great when coated with flour and fried. Where I lived, they rarely (if ever) enforced the fishing laws on kids, anyhow, except for smelt fishing. The time for netting smelt was very short, so they expected everyone to have a license. However, the fish and game warden would be the only one with a flashlight walking down the line, so it was possible to wait for him to pass by, run down, scoop a couple of buckets of smelt, and be gone before he made his way back up the line. Not that I would do anything like that.
In Idaho, we ate Trout, and that was the only fish I ate growing up. They were delicious when pan fried, and especially the ones with pink flesh. If you caught something else, you just threw it back. Some were also smoked locally, called Kokanee , which were a type of landlocked salmon. Eventually, I learned that people actually ate fish like catfish and bass. When I lived in Missouri, they had a season for people to spear sucker fish, too. They would go out at night with flat boats that had huge bright lights, which must have either helped them see the fish, or maybe drew the fish up to the boats. I worked at a little gas station at the time, so the people going fishing often stopped by for their gas first, and snacks afterwards. One night, one fellow brought all of us a bag with the fried suckerfish, and it was actually delicious ! (In case anyone is curious, suckers have a mouth that is on the bottom of their face, so they can go along ans suck up stuff off of the bottom of the lake to eat.) I liked smelt, too; but only had those when they were on sale at the grocery. They were so little that some people just cooked them whole and didn’t even clean them first, but I always cleaned them, small or not. Sucker fish, you can see the big mouth.
During my 30+ years here, I have eaten my fill of fish. When I lived in the bush, I once caught 260 salmon in a single fishing trip. We kept ~60, my fishing partner kept about the same for his family, and we passed the fish out to the elders throughout the community who were no longer able to fish. We ate fish of some kind--usually salmon--3 to 5 times a week. Whitefish, pike and trout were also available. We also caught hundreds of smelt and pickled them in a vat of vinegar and salt. The vinegar would soften the bones almost to nothing and our boys and the many of the other boys in the area would sit around the barrel with a fork and fish out the pickled smelt in total delight. the smelt out west were quite large--about 8 to 10 inches long--but the ones in this part of Alaska are apparently a different species, generally called hooligan instead of smelt, and don't hold up when pickled; once the bones dissolve, the flesh falls apart. There is no limit on smelt or hooligan for residents in Alaska, so we used to catch thousands, freeze them, and use them to snack the dog teams. They were a high calorie, oily snack that was just bite-sized for the dogs. Every year we would have one meal of beer-battered smelt in the spring, but they were not our fish of choice for human consumption. I am so tired of eating fish that I seldom do if there is anything else to eat. One of my sons has invited me to go King Salmon fishing on Monday with his family in his boat. We'll see how that goes, but it the first time I will have fished for Kings in years. Halibut fishing is an experience all on its own, and when we get a group together to charter a boat, it is great fun and fine eating. As fish goes, it is probably my favorite. My brother and sister-in-law were here for 10 days, and she mentioned having salmon the last time she was here, and said she never realized how good salmon was. They live in Pennsylvania and she had never had fresh-caught wild salmon before. She decided it was a completely different fish from what she had eaten before, and, odds-on, it was, as she was probably eating farmed Atlantic salmon, not the stuff we have here. On a business trip to Florida once, one of my co-workers decided to order salmon at a seafood restaurant there. Although she was cautioned against it by those of us who knew, she ordered it anyway and was unable to even finish consuming the meal as it was so bad and so unlike what she had become accustomed to. (I know, dangling participle)
Years ago on the Snake River, there were Japanese-owned fishing boats that netted Suckers or Carp by the ton and shipped it to Asia. There are giant Carp in both the Columbia and the Snake. In the shallow side pools on the snake below Oxbow, there are 100s of Carp 2-3 feet long. Ugly disgusting fish in my opinion.
I like my White fish and Salmon. Tuna is ok too and oily which is good for me, so I'm told. Salmon is better. Oily Sardines are healthy and cheap but.... Trying to make a Goan fish curry recently I tried several types of fish. The Nile Perch was so horrible I chucked the lot away. Next Basa which was fair, then Hoki which was fairly cheap and did the job. Then Snapper which was perfect. I'm doing it again for a dinner with Crimson Snapper and King Prawns. Not cheap but gorgeous. I guess you get what you pay for.
@Al Amoling Remember, now, swordfish is not a fish, and most species are among the highest in contained toxins. Granted, that the one time I ate swordfish, it was delicious! No bones! Frank