My Uncle's Shoes

The Fish Boil

Tom Froehlich

My family spent summers at our family cottage on the shores of Lake Michigan, on the Door County peninsula. Two doors away lived the Thorsons.  Second generation friends of our family, my mother, aunt and uncle spent the summers growing up with Dorn Thorson who is now a circuit court judge, but more importantly the master of the “fish boil”.  The fish boil’s roots appear to be Scandinavian.  The people also responsible for bringing us  “lut fisk” and “lefsa”, pickled fish and unleavened bread.  Armed with that information, now take the words “fish boil” and imagine what a culinary taste treat that’s going to be.  We, of course, felt honored because Dorn prepared this treat only once a summer.  A culinary experience for which others paid dearly, at restaurants up and down the peninsula. 

Why they did, and continue to do so, still mystifies me.  The fish boil has to be one of the most amazing marketing ploys ever conceived by mankind.  Much of the allure of the fish boil is in the preparation.  Fresh chunks of white fish are purchased at Andy’s Fish Market, just at the edge of the bridge in town (Andy’s mother also owns a string of rental cottages just down the road from us).  Dorn purchases these delights, with slimy silvery skin still intact, as his wife Betty is busy peeling potatoes and onions, and pitting cherries for her fresh cherry pies she would be serving for dessert at the end of this Scandinavian feast.  She picked the cherries herself at her brothers nearby orchard, one of the many that peppered the Door County Peninsula at the time.

 Cherries were another thing Door County was known for.  Cherry pie, cherry muffins, cherry bounce, cherry jam, cherry jelly, cherry wine, cherry juice, dried cherries, frozen cherries, fresh cherries, my mom even had an aunt living in town named Aunt Cherry.  No shit! What amazes me is that the fish boil and cherries are actually tourist attractions! I don’t know how many repeat customers attend the fish boils, or how many cherry inspired treats a person can ingest, but this guy is over it. I repeat, why they are so popular, I still can’t figure out.  So, here’s Dorn’s wife Betty, removing the pits from two pies worth of cherries with a hair pin, careful not to miss a single one, although she usually does.  The sanitary implications of this hairpin business I don’t really care to think about.  My father is typically blessed with this slice of pie.  The slice that is home to the one lone pit that Betty seems to have missed.

The other elements necessary to the “Door County Fish Boil” are a series of wrought iron kettles, a wrought iron tripod, gallons of salt water, a gallon of gasoline, a huge beach fire, and the afore mentioned silvery fish, and the potatoes and onions that Betty has so lovingly peeled. 

Dorn and Betty’s children, our summertime playmates, Marv, Karre and Torren run down the gravel road, their bare feet oblivious to the sharp stones assaulting the soles of their feet, hardened like leather by mid-July.  They announce that their father has started the fire, and this amazing event was about to begin. 

My brothers and I chase out the door, as my mother sprays on her final layer of Aqua Net.  Her hair freshly coiffed after having been washed beneath the pump outside the back door, she excitedly completes the finishing touches before attending the social event of the summer.  My father is wearing his recurring light blue “play pants”.  You know, the cotton twill kind you get at Sears with the partially elasticized waistband.  Sort of the precursor to Levi’s relaxed cut 501’s.  His fashion statement has always been, “Well, at least it’s clean.”  Ten days into our vacation, I’m not too sure how true that was.

The sun setting in a mid-summer sky, the six of us assemble ourselves on the makeshift benches made from timbers of driftwood, watching as Dorn carefully positions the tripod over the beginnings of the fire.  Sparks jump like fire flies into the night sky as he carefully adds the exact amount of wood to the fire for optimum cooking conditions.  This fastidious attention to detail is interesting, considering that final step in the fish boil, is to throw a coffee can full of gasoline onto the fire for the ever exciting over boil.  This not surprisingly, resulted in an explosion, causing a mushroom like ball of fire to rise into the night sky as we all watched in awe.  It’s amazing that we walked away with one full eyebrow among us. 

The fun now over, we are seated in Betty's kitchen around her huge round oak table, paper plates in rattan holders encircling it’s perimeter.  In the center of the table are serving dishes heaped with boiled fish (silvery skin still intact), potatoes and onions, and a basket of bread to wash down the bones should one happen to get one lodged in one’s throat.  This of course added to our unbridled enthusiasm. Oh, did I fail to mention that the fish, potato and onions were all boiled in one kettle? Mhmmm, that’s good eatin’.  Trust me, it didn’t matter how much butter you slather onto a potato boiled with fish. It still tastes like fish.  It didn’t matter that my mom would kindly remove the silvery skin from my chunk of boiled fish. It still had an opalescent glow.  My older brother looked forward to the cherry pie, and my father feared it, knowing that there was a cherry pit laying in wait. 

It didn’t matter that the meal over all was something out of a Dickens novel.  We all raved over the meal our summer friends had prepared for us.  It wasn’t about the fish or the pie or the onions.  It was about friends wanting to share with us, something they viewed as special.  With that in mind, I guess it truly was a meal to rave about.

Having sustained only minor retinal damage we walked home, knowing that once again, we have been touched by the magic of friends, family and tradition in the Door County woods.