Trout on the Mountaintop
Fresh-caught and grilled with pecans and mint
Eating fresh-caught mountain trout is an annual practice for this food pilgrim. At Buck Creek Trout Farm on NC 80 north of Marion, NC, it is possible to catch your own and “allow” the pond attendant to clean them. Heads on or off, you pay by the pound. Last October, master cook Jim Harb of Knoxville, TN, and photographer Donna Campbell and I feasted with our ridge top neighbors on these fine fishes. The recipe is one of Jim’s specialties from his days of cooking at La Residence in Chapel Hill--trout stuffed with mint and pecans. Drizzled in butter and lemon and flash fried in an enormous iron skillet–this is a dish is to remember for at least once a year. A cause for champagne, to boot!
Knoxville foodie and retired cook Jim Harb serves trout to Dennis Williams in an October meal that included hoe cakes, limas, sorrel salad, and home baked bread. Photo by Donna Campbell
On Labor Day weekend this year some guests from Georgia came to visit at my cabin in Little Switzerland, NC, and when Sunday morning broke cloudless and cool, we headed the twenty miles down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the eastern United States. After winding our way up the road with surprisingly little company, we stepped out of the car into air that was delicious, virtuous, and perfectly chilled. Sipping such elegant draughts on the short trail up to the observation station was giddy-making. At the top: altitude 6,684 feet above sea level.
At the summit we twirled like Julie Andrews in the Alps to absorb the view. Then, on the way down we paid respects at the grave of explorer and storyteller Elijah Mitchell, who died in June of 1857 as he traversed the precarious wilderness near the peak that now carries his name. his body was found at the bottom of a steep waterfall. Mitchell’s pocket watch, still on his person, had also gone still.
The Balsam Gift Shop, adjacent to the peak’s parking lot, was filled with the bracing scent of the mountaintop trees that survive here in the fiercest winter weather that North Carolina has to offer. I bought a small sachet filled with spruce needles to sock away in my linen trunk at the cabin.
By lunchtime we had found our way to a sturdy wooden table at the Mount Mitchell State Park Restaurant about a quarter mile below the mountaintop. We admired the airy, cathedral-ceilinged dining room slabbed in yellow pine and accented by walls of native stone. Floor to ceiling windows opened to the long view of ridgetops to the south and east and the closer flurry of monarch butterflies lifting and dropping among the blooming wildflowers just outside and down the slope.
This destination is one of those places where you only have to wait a few minutes before the weather can change, bringing dramatic clouds, showers, snow, or lightning and thunder, depending on the season. One October at the peak of fall colors, rime ice (frozen fog) blew in over night, covering the spruce with strangely sculpted frost–the trees and shrubs had become a Dr. Seuss fantasy world of jagged white figures looming over the blaze of warm reds, yellows and oranges below. Only the bold red berries of the Mountain Ash broke the veil of white on top.
Rime Ice frozen in the wind on Mountain Ash trees.
Photo by Donna Campbell
Without much hesitation and carrying the kind of hunger created by a change in climate and altitude, two of us instantly ordered the trout, the most expensive item on the unpretentious meat-and-two menu. Described simply in print as “head off, bone in, skin on,” the trout, our server further promised, would be simply “pan fried without breading in olive oil and topped with lemon.” Slaw and a baked potato came with it.
So it was the finest trout I’ve had since the meal with mint and pecans. If you are headed to the top of Mitchell any time before the road closes for winter, come hungry and order the trout. It is sweet, moist, very fresh and local. Something to look forward to again and again, which is the whole point.