1/11/2024 0 Comments Ugly fish with big teethYet they also are the source of much pleasure when eaten with a squeeze of lemon. Anyone who has stepped on a sea urchin knows how much pain the little critters can inflict. In the waters off Florida there lives a spiny marine animal that looks like - and feels like - a pin cushion. The French call it Araignee de mer and devour some 30 million pounds a year. After being processed, spider crab is sold as snow crab, tanner crab and queen crab. The meat is equal to any edible crabmeat, it just comes in an unappealing package. These monsters have extremely long legs and their bodies are covered with a dense growth of chitinous hairs, which accounts for their name. But the stone crabs’ cousin - the spider crab - is another story. Most people are familiar with the succulent meat of stone crabs and the crabs’ rather benign appearance. Houndfish can grow to 5 feet in length, and, while they look like a cross between a Disney cartoon character and a science-fiction beast, they can be a tasty item. I’ve broken many a steel-point knife on rose fish.”Īnother odd species is the serpent-like houndfish, whose pale-green, heavily boned flesh and multitoothed beak discourage would-be diners. “It tastes just like chicken,” Grosscup insists. Bill Grosscup, captain of the Sea Eagle, a Key West dive boat, says that rose is a rare treat when filleted, basted with lemon garlic sauce and grilled to perfection. More unusual than shark and more of a challenge to prepare for consumption is the rose fish, with its huge eyes and sharp gill points. Some shark, including cow and Greenland shark, can be toxic, but most varieties are delicious when used in a range of dishes, from appetizers to casseroles. Often, it is marketed under different names, such as harbor halibut, rock salmon and whitefish, to make it more palatable. It wasn’t long before Terry was contentedly chowing down on “Captain Pat’s Hunan Grouper Head.”īecause of its poor public relations, shark has never been a popular consumer fish, though it is served regularly in restaurants and is available in fish markets. “Pat promised that I was in for a real treat once he finished preparing those fish heads.” But once caught, skinned and marinated, it makes for wonderful eating. Even a small jewfish (60 pounds) is capable of breaking all but the heaviest tackle. Catching a jewfish, though, is not as simple as meeting one. Jewfish prefer shallow water, so encounters with divers and fishermen are common. It often reaches a weight of 800 pounds, and its huge, roll-lipped mouth can easily encompass a human. The jewfish, long credited with being the Biblical home of the prophet Jonah, is an overgrown member of the bass family found in the Gulf of Mexico, along the coast of South America and in South Florida waters. But had the tables been turned, the dentist could have taken home a great delicacy. The fish undoubtedly exercised sound judgment. The giant fish sucked the man through rows of fierce-looking fangs and was up to the dentist’s shoulders, so the tale goes, when it spit him out and swam away in pursuit of a more delectable dinner. The teeth gleamed in the mouth of a mammoth jewfish that came upon the dentist while he was scuba diving. ON THE DOCKS OF GARRISON Bight, Key Westers still talk about the time a local dentist provided the filling for a fancy set of teeth.
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