Muttonfish at Apollo Bay
by Martin Field
One summer, when I was about twelve years old, I went camping with friends and we set up our tents by a creek near the surf, down Apollo Bay way. Rob and I spent the days getting sunburnt, trying to bodysurf, fishing, chasing elusive crayfish and generally mucking about. To quote Noel Coward, ‘I couldn’t have liked it more.’ While snorkelling below the turbulent water line we scraped from the rocks a number of strange-looking, ear-shaped shells. I thought they were a sort of large sea slug but Rob’s dad Art told me they were muttonfish, which, he said, the locals used for fishing bait.
We prepared the bait for breakfast the next morning, with Art in the director’s chair. First, we cut the flesh out of the shell – revealing an iridescent mother of pearl lining. Then we cut the rather repulsive guts from the flesh and tossed them into the creek. Then, using knives, we sliced unappealing black layers of skin from the sides of the muscly flesh – washing the muck into the running creek water while flicking away eels that were nosing up for a feed. We were left with lumps of strange looking, off-white meat that, because of its toughness, we pounded with rocks to tenderise.
Art then cut the finished product into potato chip shaped pieces (like French fries, that is). An unforgettable breakfast followed. We fried the muttonfish chips in smoking hot lard over our campfire. On the side, we had fried eggs and bacon, hunks of bread that we’d toasted over the fire and slathered with butter. All of this we washed down with condensed milk sweetened, gum-leaf smoky billy tea. The muttonfish tasted delicious: a hybrid mix, somewhere between fried chicken, fried fish and fried steak.
Years later, I learned that the despised muttonfish (aka fish bait) we’d feasted on was abalone. In Australia abalone currently sells for around $50 to $80 the kilogram and you can pay $120 plus for 100 grams of the stuff at flash Chinese restaurants.
But I bet it will never taste as good as Art’s priceless muttonfish that we had for breakfast all those years ago, down Apollo Bay way.