Concerning Carp
BY HERBERT PALMER.
TO the people of England the carp as a fish for the table is unknown or despised. In this, as in so many other matters, edible and unedible, we are aloof from the rest of Europe, for I think that the prominent fish of the Continent (where fresh water fish are caught with nets for the market) is not the salmon or trout, the cod or the mackerel, but the carp. It is entertaining to pay a visit to a French fish stall on a town square. You thread your way through eager throngs of buyers and sellers, fierce little fellows in blue blouses, and wizened old white-capped market-women, all jostling and babbling and bawling. Somewhere in the middle stands the fishmonger's stall, the fat brown carp swimming about in a glass case or lying in a moist heap, writhing and palpitating in their hard scale armour—for carp live a long time out of the water. He is a common article of food, probably the commonest of all superior French fish food, and his sweet if slightly muddy flavoured yellow- brownish-white flesh tastes well enough in water that has been well enriched with red wine. But the Prussians boil him in water that has been enriched with beer or white Rhenish, serve up the whole fish with his armour instead of hacking him into cutlets as do the French, and make of him the finest dish imaginable. As in medieval and early Christian lore the fish again becomes something of a sacred symbol, for it is round about Christmas and the New Year that German carp luncheons and suppers arc so much in evidence. Praises to Heaven for those carp, that holy Yule-tide fare, for I always found them very Christmassy and good to eat—let the. English epicure malign them as much as he likes.
He is a " classic " fish, too. Aristotle, Pliny, Sir Francis Bacon, Von Gesner, and other ancient notables have all had something to say about him ; and there is little doubt that the old Romans relished him greatly and that the early Christian fish symbol often took the broad form of a carp. Izaak Walton writes of him with tremendous reverence, and among many strange things tells us, " The physicians make the galls and stones in the heads of carps to be very medicinable. But it is not to be doubted but that in Italy they make great profit of the spawn of carps, by selling it to the Jews, who make it into red caviare ; the Jews not being by their law admitted to eat of caviare made of the sturgeon, that being a fish that wants scales, and (as may appear in Levit. xi.) by them reputed to be unclean."
He is an uncanny fish, too. Izaak Walton writes about him not only with reverence but also as if he were a little uncanny. And I can also speak from experience, for some remarks I once made about him got me into shocking trouble with an editor—such an absurd storm in a teacup, It is as if he has been bewitched by the mediaeval monks ; for every angler has been strangely frustrated or bewil- dered by him. That writer of fine angling essays, Arthur Ransome, tells the following queer anecdote about a big carp ; " On. the fourth occasion one of the monsters made a direct run of thirty yards' and then broke me, the fine gut cast parting above the float. Then there occurred an incident that illustrates the uncanny nature of these fish. My float, lying out in the middle of the pond, turned and sailed slowly in again to my very feet, towed by the monster who then in some manner freed himself, thus returning me my tackle with a sardonic invitation to try again. No other fish is capable of putting so fine a point on irony."
But I must now confess that I have never caught a carp, though on one or two occasions I have angled for him. Natural indolence and impatience have always con- spired to hinder me from probing his depths. One may catch him in the evening, just before and round about sundown, but the best time is the very early morning ; and the months should be July, August, or September. I do not like getting up at two, three and four o'clock and have generally left such early fishing to my friends. But though I have never caught carp I have sometimes watched them. I have seen great quantities of them in a French canal connected with the river Cher, huge fellows up to five pounds in weight, rubbing their sides against the weeds.. The French angler armed himself with a strong• bamboo pole with a flexible top, a strong gut trace, .three or four yards of thin twine (no reel or running-tackle) and a big bottle-cork for a float. I understand that the rush of a big carp as soon as he feels the hook is like lightning, so those Frenchmen with their short primitive lines must have used very strong gut. But an enthusiastic carp- fisher who wished to sophisticate and anglicize his fishing was so impressed by my ten foot split-bamboo trout rod, that he borrowed it for a week to look at, and after pro- curing some lengths of good bamboo, made such a fine carp rod of fourteen feet on the same pattern, that he put all other fishing rods to shame. Nobody could carp at his carp-rod, a marvellous three-jointed feat of hexagonal workmanship, and one which became the admiration of the countryside—a four guinea rod in these days.
I have spoken of the outside colour of the carp as brown. So he seemed to me, though I think I remember a tinge of green down his sides. But there is more thaii one kind of carp, and an English friend who lives nearly opposite has just recently told me that he once caught a quantity of big carp which were as " golden as sovereigns," and that they turned the silvery colour of roach after they had been a few hours out of the water. A peculiar species is the Crucian carp, which is allied to the goldfish, and pictures of him have always made me think of fantastic fishes on Japanese fans. A small muddy pond on the estate of a Prussian junker where I once spent two strange wild months was full of crucians as well as croaking frogs. The junkers told me that nobody had ever caught one of their crucians with a rod and line, and certainly my own efforts in that direction were quite unsuccessful. But I realize to-day that I fished in the wrong month, that I did not get up at three o'clock on a hot summer's day, and that I did not use the right vegetarian bait—bread and honey paste is, I understand, one of the best ; for all fish of the carp family (which are more ,or lessvegetarians) bite well at some kind of a paste bait, though the French often use boiled wheat.
The two or three most prominent species of carp have fleshy whiskers similar to the barbel's hanging from their upper jaws. But a species of carp, without whiskers, one which everybody is familiar with, is earassius auratus, the gold fish of the glass bowl and garden fountain tank. His real home, I suppose, is China, and so he is the most continental of all carp. Really though I ought to say "she," for the gold fish is the most feminine of all fishes, is the nymph of fishes. But if angels are gold coloured and angels are masculine gender then the gold fish is " he " in spite of her nymph qualities. The poet Cray has thought of her in this way, and has written a pretty lyric about her and the tabby cat which tried to catch her and fell into her prison tub and was drowned.
One might almost imagine that gold fishes, which seem to eat nothing at all, arc the reincarnations of deceased fresh-water fishes which deserve futurity. They are- 0 my mad brain !—tangible manifestations of fish spiri- tuality ; though none of them, I hope, include any of those fresh-water devils called " pike." Like angels or gleaming ghosts they glide round glass bowls to tantalize poor cats and remind even poorer human beings that all is not earthly gold that glisters.
Previous page
