Oh sure, you say, you’ve long heard of eating amberjack. But we’re not talking AJs, or any of their first cousins, or any fancy jacks like rainbow runners or bar or even yellow jacks. We’re talking plain old everyday crevalle jacks, and we recommend you don’t skip to the next story unless you already know how good jacks are to eat. After all, were a quarter-million Bahamians wrong about conch fritters? Throughout the Bahamas and the Caribbean, jacks of all kinds are esteemed for their rich flavor and firm flesh.

So, if you are inclined to ignore the following revelations and rely on the advice of others, do yourself the favor of clarifying one simple point. Ask anyone who disparages the flavor of crevalle if they ever have eaten it. Likely they are just passing on a rumor started by some fish lover long ago, so he could have all the jacks for himself.

You don’t have to do anything you shouldn’t do with any other good fish you intend to eat. Step one being to immediately ice the fish alive, which does two really good things. First, it draws most of the blood into the fish’s internal organs, in a survival reaction for the fish, and as a flavor enhancer for you. Never mind what you may think of a juicy beefsteak; blood doesn’t do anything for a fish’s flavor, or its appearance. Remember the last time you kept a fish alive on a stringer or in the livewell, and killed it with a fillet knife? Remember what a bloody mess the second fillet was compared to the first half, from which all the blood drained into the bottom side of the fish?

Icing your fish alive remedies that problem almost completely. And if you’ve got the time, slicing through the fish’s gill arches while you hold it overboard is a very quick way to get rid of all its blood before you put it on ice, or especially if you don’t have any ice to put it on.

The second thing ice does for a fish is make it firm, and thus ideal for slicing. Fillets from iced fish are just plain prettier and, third but not least, way less likely to breed bacteria picked up off the fish-cleaning table.

You can, of course, make all kinds of fancy maneuvers with a fillet knife, slicing away the red meat on the fillet to avoid the strong flavor. I didn’t with three jacks I put through the (stomach) acid test, just because I didn’t want to do anything different than I ever do with other fish. Unless you count taking them to a master chef.

For my test of crevalle I enlisted the help of Fort Myers chef Vollen Loucks. Vollen Loucks is not an Army-trained 94-B-20-type cook, as I was, but a guy whose pinot noir sauce could transform tongue of combat boot into haute cuisine. Besides which, Vollen will be the first to tell you he is not a real seafood lover, although that did not stop salmon from being his restaurant’s biggest seller.

So it was that I showed up at Vollen’s back door with a half-dozen fillets of crevalle on ice. The sultry August day before, the 2- to 3-pound fish had been buzzing about in Punta Gorda Isles canals. They were bled when caught, filleted and skinned within a couple of hours of being iced, but otherwise had not been given special treatment of any kind.

The first thing Vollen did was appraise the fish for texture, noting the flesh was very dense, not unlike tuna. He deboned each already ribless fillet by cutting out the pin bones almost all fish have running down the center from the head end, toward the tail. The bones are more easily felt with a fingertip than seen. For a whole-fillet presentation, the pin bones can be cut out, leaving a V-shaped notch. Or the fillet can be cut in half lengthwise before the bones are sliced away. Vollen notched two fillets and cut the others in half.

Each piece of fish was seasoned with sea salt and white pepper. The first then was dredged in flour and sautéed for a minute or two per side in vegetable oil that was just beginning to smoke from high heat. In compulsive chef fashion, Vollen also threw in some smoked tomato meats and roasted red peppers, which of course were absolutely delicious, but which did not appreciably alter the flavor of the fish. Then with a big glug of white table wine (a California chardonnay), he lit up the whole mess like Disney World on the Fourth of July, deglazing the dish until the liquid was reduced to a glorious sauce.

You are of course saying sure, the last thing the cat dragged in would have tasted good if it was gussied up like that. That jack sure did, even by Vollen’s standards, but that was not the half of the experiment.