The next fillet was simply tossed on a 90,000-B.T.U. grill that etched dark brown crisscrosses into each side, while leaving clear juice in the center. There was no stopping Vollen and his sauces, one of which was purée of prickly pears he had plucked from a cactus patch outside his back door. The artfully drizzled sauce was as vibrant to taste as it was brilliant to behold, but it served as it should have—a mere complement to the delicious flavor of the grilled jack, which we agreed was even better than that sautéed.

I ate the whole fillet without coming up for air, as I had done the first, after allowing Vollen a taste. For his finale, he deep-fried the remaining pieces after they had been dipped in egg wash and breaded in cornflakes.

“Like everyone does crunchy grouper,” Vollen said, “everyone” being the competition in his tier of the restaurant trade.

With the crunchy jacks he provided two dressings—a homemade rémoulade and a mango mayonnaise—either of which was to die for if your arteries were not up to the task. Fortunately, I was too stuffed to do more than taste the combinations, both of which were splendid, as by that time we expected. What was unexpected was how unbelievably good the remaining seven pieces of fried jack were after I doggy-bagged them and ate them cold, one by one, straight out of my refrigerator over the following two days.

So there you go—sautéed, chargrilled or fried crunchy, there doesn’t seem to be a way to mess up a jack, save one. Back in my brief tenure as a snook guide, I had a repeat customer who was a light-tackle bluefish fanatic from Long Island.

On one trip, he and his son-in-law doubled on a couple of typically ferocious jacks that would have pushed 10 pounds, after which he inquired if it might be possible to take the fish home for dinner. I knew he liked bluefish, so I noted the jacks weren’t a poisonous species, but at the time I had to admit I had only tried them one way. That was smoked on a charcoal grill, after soaking the skin-on fillets in brine for 15 minutes. I didn’t add that my experience had included a quantity of cold beverages that I couldn’t be sure hadn’t colored my opinion of the results, which I had thought were good.

He thought that a reasonable risk, so I bled and iced the fish, and then made sure I got a full report on the results.

“Not bad,” he said of the jacks, which the whole family had eaten. “But the next time, I don’t think I’d soak them in brine. They were awfully bland.”

FS