In a lovely book of 2008, America Eats, author Pat Willard puts fish fries into her subtitle, but hardly mentions them in her book-length discussion of food events in American culture. Examining the custom in our own region, I have figured out why. Willard relies heavily on WPA interview transcripts from the 1930s. And fish fries, it turns out, are a more recently evolved custom than that. I mean fish fries as a come-all, public event for profit or charity, as a community institution.
The cultural history of fish fries is remembered history, often recounted by journalists, but consensus places the center of fish-fry culture to the east of North Dakota, in the Midwest, more specifically Wisconsin. It makes sense in a region filled with immigrants, many Catholic, hugging the Great Lakes. It comes more slowly to the prairies.
A folk-tale credits a pope in the distant past with instituting meat fasts as an astute measure to benefit fishermen. Actually, no; there is no evidence of that. Meatless holidays and meatless Fridays accumulated incrementally on the church calendar. Protestants were not observant—until in the 1540s, when it was King Edward VI who restored legal meatless days, in fact, to benefit fishermen. When Pope John Paul loosened fasting requirements in the 1960s, there remained the practice of meatless Fridays during Lent.
Over here, a couple of other factors were at work. Prohibition moved tavern operators to offer free fried fish to patrons, and then on arrival, served them beer surreptitiously. Then, post-Prohibition, came meat rationing during World War II, and supper clubs instituted all-you-can-eat fish fries for protein-starved customers. Postwar the Lenten custom continued, both for profit, but more and more, for charity, with benevolent organizations serving the public.
In North Dakota we are on the edge of all this, but since World War II, fish fries have proliferated as community events. In the nineteenth century, they were private affairs, often happening when some adept recreational fisherman had a surplus of fish and fed his friends. I find that in 1920, about 1500 people, despite a disabled Missouri River ferry, attended a fish fry in American Legion Park, Trenton. A large number also attended a catfish fry in Stanton in 1927, despite the problem that high water made fishing hard for the local fellows who had promised to provide the fish, and the catfish had to be purchased.
These were not fish fries in the modern sense. They were fish festivals that also comprised ball games and other festivities over two or more days—including a prize fight in Stanton. Soon, though, taverns were beginning to advertise fish fries on Fridays. An early example was the Skaluda Tavern, at Grafton, in the 1940s, beginning during the meat rationing days of the Second World War.
By my research, I declare the inauguration of the modern fish fry—a public event, generally hosted by a church or other benevolent organization—to be at St. Michael’s Church of Grand Forks, during the Lenten season of 1955. Weekly Friday fish fries there charged one dollar for adults, fifty cents for children. This Lenten season of 2026 they are firing up the fryers at the Till House for the Lakota School District, at Wells Drinking Well in Park River for the baseball and softball programs, at the Argusville Community Hall for St. William’s Church, and at scores of other venues across the state. The Catholic dioceses of Bismarck and Fargo promote the events. And of course, taverns also get in on the action. I resolve to get to several such events myself this year, including my usual, at the Farmhouse Fraternity of NDSU.
