Fried Catfish with Pecan Sauce

One of my earliest childhood memories is catching hideous catfish in the Catawba River outside Charlotte, North Carolina, watching my grandfather and mother clean the fish and fry them in a huge cast-iron skillet, and eating them with coleslaw, hush puppies, and, by all means, ketchup. Of course, catfish was considered “common” in those days, and I still snicker today when I read about the sweet fish being so fashionable in restaurants or watch trendy chefs preparing and saucing it as if it