Food Porn Friday: I dreamed a dream…of catfish

The seafood platter at Middendorf’s, and in my dreams

I dream about food.

That’s not surprising, you’d think, knowing that I cook and eat and write about food constantly, for a living. As a friend once quipped about my life: Bread and butter really is my bread and butter.

In the same way that I’m sure an accountant sometimes dreams of spreadsheets, a tailor dreams of fabric, or a rancher dreams of his herd, I often awake in the morning having spent several hours dreaming that, for instance, I was competing in a grilled-cheese challenge on Top Chef. (My recipe involved duck confit, gruyere and pickled cherry peppers on duck fat-toasted sour dough. Yeah, I literally came up with that one in my sleep.)

But some dreams are deeper, more vivid, and linger longer than others. When I was living in New York for a decade, I’d often dream — and daydream — about the food of New Orleans, the cuisine of my youth, my heritage. Oysters, crabs, crawfish, gargantuan Gulf shrimp, a roast beef po-boy swimming in dark, rich gravy and mynez, they’d all float through my mind as I would drift off, gliding away on a lullaby of Louisiana specialties. And among them, always, was the incomparable thin-fried catfish at Middendorf’s.

I recently returned to that temple of golden-fried seafood for an article I wrote (which you can find here, and which includes even more food pornography), both about the restaurant and its food, as well as the new owners’ battles against nature in a flood-prone part of the world. The food was all splendid, but the catfish … my god, the catfish.

My dreams hadn’t lied to me. It really was as good as it had been in my reveries for so many years. Tucking into that impressive tower of crispy, thin-fried, grease-free golden goodness, I couldn’t imagine being any happier.

And for you? What do you dream of, when you dream of food?

Native New Orleans food writer Scott Gold, author of The Shameless Carnivore and a blog by the same name, has written for Gourmet, Edible Brooklyn, The Faster Times, and other publications. His Food Porn Friday column for NolaVie offers a weekly mouth-watering photo designed to start culinary conversations in the Big Easy. Catch his weekly food column for The Advocate here.