August 12, 2014 — Midwesterners surely love their pot roast Sunday dinners and pork-based breakfast meats… But the Midwest is a vast region, and an equally as relevant (if not forgotten) tradition to the Great Lakes region of Middle America is the fishing industry.
For generations, small farms raising livestock and growing a glut of different crops pocked flyover country’s landscape and hearty, heaping plates of those bounties became something of a tradition in the Midwest. But the Midwest is a vast region, and an equally as relevant (if not forgotten) tradition to the Great Lakes region of Middle America is the fishing industry. And with it came the roadside smokehouses that deliver smoked fish of all stripes to the curious and tradition-craving Midwesterner.
Americans on the coasts and in the Great Lakes formerly feasted on whatever local seafood or fish was available—think mountains of oyster shells in New York, flapping bonanzas of smelt in the Great Lakes, and writhing chinooks in Oregon—but over the second half of the 20th century the American diet shifted almost entirely to grazing animals, giving birth to “bacon-paloozas” and “quadruple-patty” monstrosities commonly found in eateries across this great nation.
But if you’re willing to pump the brakes on the heart-clogging, ketchup-drowned burger for a minute, you can still experience the old traditions of the humble Great Lakes and beyond. Nestled in a corner of Chicago’s deepest south side, a mere 4,000 feet from the Indiana state line, sits a temple of smoked and fishy goodness: Calumet Fisheries, a red-roofed shack that’s fed generations of blue-collar workers from the nearby foundries of Gary and Hammond since 1928.
Perched on the banks of its namesake river, the Fisheries has been a local secret for decades, serving smoked salmon steaks, heads and collars, rainbow trout, sable, sturgeon, catfish, eel, and more. It was originally located on 92nd Street, but following the expansion of a turning basin on the river for ore freighters, the owners opted to relocate a few blocks downstream to its current home just west of the 95th Street bridge, with a little help in the form of a river barge that had been mounted with a crane. The restaurant was simply floated down the river.
The move helped to snare some of the trucker and tourist traffic that snakes through the tangle of lower-middle-class homes and factories that make up northwest Indiana and northeast Illinois’ tapestry. Hungry passersby would pop in to the seating-free store front and get orders of fried and smoked fish to go.
And since the beginning of the 70s, there’s been one man behind every order of smoked salmon steaks or every half-order of fried smelt at Calumet Fisheries: Edmundo, the head smoker. “It all starts the night before,” he tells me. “I come in, I cut the salmon into steaks, same with the trout, and I filet the whitefish. I brine the fish, I season them and they’re ready for the morning.”
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