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Taste By Greg Atkinson

Out Of The Frying Pan

and into the fire of a father-in-law's passion

MY FATHER is not what you'd call "outdoorsy." His idea of the great outdoors is more akin to a golf course than a mountain trail. So when I fell in love with a girl from the Pacific Northwest, it took me a while to get used to her father's idea of the great outdoors. Born to a couple of pioneer types who opened the first bank in Seward, Alaska, before returning to Washington state in the 1920s, W. Erich Lucas is a true outdoorsman. He lives to hike, camp, ski and fish.

When I was still in my 20s and considered myself something of a hiker, I could never quite keep up with him on a mountain trail, even though he was already well into his 60s. Erich doesn't feel like he's really gotten outside until he has trekked at least a mile or two away from the car, which he generally leaves along the side of some unmapped logging road that meanders into the foothills of the Cascade or Olympic Mountains. And his five daughters (my wife is his youngest) have all inherited, to some degree, his passions — especially the one for trout fishing.

"Some fathers worked," reported one of my sisters-in-law. "My father fished; fly fished, that is. Not that he didn't work at fishing, he did, but for him that kind of work was pure play." In a recent e-mail, she waxed poetic about her father's obsession. "Play in which you got to hike up mountain streams, slip on mossy rocks, trip over rolling boulders and otherwise splash about in search of the illusive brook trout that hid in shaded eddies, jumped impossible waterfalls and fought the rushing torrents of water that swelled the streams in summer from the melting snow that came from somewhere higher up the hill. We kids got deposited beside the stream to loll in the meadow among the wildflowers until our father returned late in the afternoon laden with a creel full of beautifully colored fish, glassy eyed, with their mouths still agape as if caught in surprise."

Over the years, Erich has tried to teach me a little about trout fishing, but, since I was the fifth in a long line of sons-in-law, and since I didn't seem to show much enthusiasm for the sport, he didn't push it. Instead, I persuaded him to let me gut the fish and fry them. I love cooking over a campfire, and the ultimate campfire food, the dish that elevates the whole genre to an art form, is pan-fried trout.

It was years before I realized what an honor this was. Cooking the trout is, of course, one of the best parts of trout fishing. And Erich is as good at cooking trout as he is at catching it. He never goes fishing without a portable frying pan, a flask of oil and a pocket-sized cache of cornmeal, salt and pepper. A thin coat of natural jelly, sparkling clear like the finest gelatin, coats a really fresh trout, and since the scales are tiny and delicate, there is no need to scrape them, or the precious jelly, off the fish. This allows the cornmeal to cling to the fish without having to dip it in milk or egg or anything else that would gunk it up.

"One by one," recalls my sister-in-law, "he would add the fish to the frying pan while all of us kids lurked hungrily nearby hoping he would choose us to give the first fish to. The smell of the oil and trout mingled with the scent of evergreen and heather. The fish were flipped expertly, at just the right moment when the skin was crispy brown and the meat was tender, by leathery hands scarred with cuts and thickened with years of exposure to sun and rain, my father's hands that knew how to tie a fly and cast it out on the water with the grace of a dragonfly alighting on a lily pad."

Greg Atkinson is author of "Entertaining in the Northwest Style." He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com.