Friday Night, Lent, and the Smell of Fried Fish

The line forms at the side door of the parish center, but the smell is already outside. It is a Friday in the first week of March, the light gone from a gray sky, the parking lot crowded with minivans and pickup trucks, and the air carries hot oil and batter down the concrete steps to the sidewalk. People stamp their feet. Nobody leaves.

The line moves the way such lines move: slowly, with patience, in a cold that would have ended any other event in any other month. Inside, at the bottom of the stairs, the paper tickets are collected, and the whole basement opens at once — the sudden warmth, the fluorescent lights, the long tables in their plastic tablecloths, the counter at the far end where a row of volunteers leans over aluminum pans.

The Line Out the Door

The fish fry runs on a schedule that nobody can remember beginning. The doors open in the late afternoon, the line is out the door within the hour, and by early evening the basement is full and the pie table is doing a brisk trade. The pies were baked on Wednesday and Thursday, and they run out a few minutes before the doors close, which is part of the pattern and nobody's fault.

The meal arrives on a paper plate: two pieces of fried fish with a batter that is crisp and pale gold, the flesh flaking white under the tine of a plastic fork. Beside it sit the fries or the boiled potatoes, the coleslaw in a paper cup, the wedge of rye bread, the little sleeve of tartar sauce. Coffee comes from an urn with a scorched drip line down its front. The children get milk in cartons and an extra piece of fish if they ask nicely.

The tables are long and shared. People who arrived alone find themselves across from other people who arrived alone, and by the end of the meal they are deep in the questions of the season: the condition of the lake ice, the price of spring seed, the road work coming as soon as the frost lets go. The children are eating their fish with their fingers. A man at the end of the table folds half his meal into a napkin for his wife, who is at the school play.

The room itself is not much. Cinder-block walls painted beige, fluorescent lights, a bulletin board with a sign for the young adult group. The windows are set high in the wall, and behind them is the dark of March, the snowbanks gone gray at the edges. It does not matter. The basement is full, it is warm, and it smells of frying fish, which in March in the upper Midwest is close to all a room has to be.

Why Friday Means Fish

The fish is older than the paper plate by a long stretch. For centuries the church has kept the discipline of abstaining from meat on Friday, the practice of giving something up, of eating a meal that does not taste like a celebration. Fish was the answer. The custom came across the Atlantic with the immigrants, and in the upper Midwest it took root in a way that has outlived the strictness of the rule itself. Plenty of people in line on a Friday night are not Catholic and do not abstain from anything. They are there because the fryer is on, and the fryer is on because the calendar says Lent.

The American version grew where the parish gathers. In many churches, Friday evening means the Stations of the Cross, and the basement begins filling before the prayers are over. The parish supper turned into a fundraiser somewhere along the way, and the fire department had the same idea with a bigger fryer. The two institutions grew up parallel, a couple of miles apart, both serving fried fish on paper plates to whoever walks in.

Lent begins some years in February and some in March, and in either case it arrives too early for the weather. The fish fry is what carries the season through. It gives the six weeks of Friday their shape: the first one is a memory, the second a habit, and by the fifth the regulars have opinions about which table is theirs, about the ratio of fish to coleslaw, about the batch that slipped the week before.

The abstinence is real, but it is not what fills the room. What fills the room is the doing of it together. The parish eats fish because the calendar asks it, and the town across the street eats fish because the parish is putting it on the table. By the middle of March, that distinction has stopped mattering. What matters is that the lights are on, the doors are open, and the whole block can smell it.

The Basement and the Fire Hall

The church basement and the fire hall run side by side through Lent, occasionally within sight of each other. They are not the same room. The basement is quieter: the coffee urn, the paper doilies under the pies, the older crowd that has been coming since the tables were wood. The fire hall is louder. The floors are concrete, the tables are longer, and the beer cooler is open to anyone who can find the handle. The men at the fryers are the same men who answer when somebody slides off the county road in January. On Friday nights they stand in their department hoodies, turning fish with long tongs, and the room has the particular joy of equipment being used for something good.

The fish depends on what the distributor had. Cod is the workhorse: white, mild, patient with a long line. Haddock is a little sweeter and flakes lighter. Walleye is the local prize, the fish of these lakes, and on the Fridays when it is on the board the line moves with a different energy. People order it without being asked. The ones who missed it take the cod and do not complain, but they want to know when the next batch goes in.

North of the cities, the habit widens. In the lake country and the iron towns, some halls and taverns fry fish every Friday of the year, because the fish fry is simply the Friday meal in those places. But Lent is when it peaks. The year-round kitchens see their lines double, and the halls that seem to exist for nothing else pull out every folding table they own. The season changes the shape of the town for an evening, six times in a row, and then stops.

A Season of Six Fridays

By the last week of Lent, the season has done what March always does: it has turned. The snowbanks have shrunk, and the parking lot is mud at the edges. The line forms later because the light stays longer, not by much, but enough to notice from the high basement windows, where the sidewalk has gone from gray snow to bare blacktop.

Some basements hold their final fish fry on Good Friday, and that line can be the longest of the season, people standing in the dark with their collars up. Others close the week before and leave the night to the fire halls and the taverns. Either way, the season ends in the same cold it started in, and the car smells of fried fish on the drive home.

Then the fryers are cleaned. The plastic tablecloths come off and go into the washtub. The freezers that held the cod hold something else by May. The basement becomes just a basement again, cavernous and quiet, the way rooms are when the lights are off and there is no line outside.

But the calendar turns, and the season comes back. Some years it lands in February and some in March, and on the first Friday of Lent it is always the same: the parking lot full, the line out the door, the smell of hot oil standing in the cold air. It is not the oldest ritual of the church year, nor the most solemn, nor the most beautiful. It is the one that smells like something. It is the one people stand in line for, stamping their feet in the dark, glad to wait, because inside there is hot fish on a paper plate and a table waiting under the fluorescent lights.