Southern Trash Fish... This is a freshwater fish. The chain pickerel, which locally is called a jack fish (not to be confused with jack cravalle which is a saltwater fish), this fish in some areas is also called a southern pike, although it is a pickerel, not a pike.
It's a bony fish. For most of my life I never knew anyone who kept them, they cussed them because they're aggressive if you get into them when you're fishing, but no one kept them, just cut them and threw them back. We were wrong all those years. The meat on a jackfish is a firm, very not-fishy tasting, sort of a flavor cross between a flounder and blue crab meat. It is a little work, but well worth it.
There are a couple of ways to prepare a jack fish. If it is a small fish, you can scale it, head it, gut it, and then wash it off, of course. Then you "stob" it. <<Technical term I learned from the guy that taught me how to clean them. this fish will be in one piece and will have the skin on. To "stob" the fish, you go down each side of the fish make cuts about 1 to 1 1/2 inch apart from the top toward the belly of the fish about halfway to the spine. I've made one of the most crude drawings to show what I mean... no one EVER looked at me and said, "now, she can draw!" and there's a reason they didn't say that...
The blue marks indicate the stobbing, they aren't all equal or straight and they won't be when you prep the fish either. The goal is to expose as much of the meat to the hot oil as possible when you fry it. (Remember this is for smaller jackfish, 12 inches or under.)
Now, use your favorite breading, bread it and fry it in hot oil, fry these crispy on the outside, need to be a deepish golden brown. The little bones will become edible because of the preparation method and you'll just eat the fish to the backbone.
That method doesn't work for larger jack fish.
For a larger jackfish, make two standard filets, one on each side of the fish. Then there is a strip of Y-bones that you cut a piece off each side, and one more smaller strip of bones you'll want to cut out. I've watched several videos and this one has the clearest demo of how to cut around those bones.
You might wonder why you'd go to the trouble to work around the bones in a jackfish. It's because it is one of the finest tasting freshwater fish around. It is really worth the effort. Besides, sometimes when you go fishing, especially in the little side cuts in some of the rivers, you can get a boat full of jackfish when nothing else is biting. Don't go home skunked. Go home with some meat that will be so good it'll make you howl.