A friend gave me some carp he had smoked. It was every bit as good as smoked salmon. After that when someone caught a carp they would save it for me to smoke. No jokes about being hard to light up.
He also made pickled pike.
When I lived in Illinois on the Fox river the carp would spawn so thick it seemed you could walk on them.
Well, like MsBeepBeep says, they are just a big GOLDfish. ;-)
We used to have a Carpie Derby sponsored by a local radio station here on the Susquehanna River. It was a blast and a lot of silliness.
I had a neighbor when I lived on the Chenango River who was also a fly fisherman and we used to try catching carp by sight-fishing with nymphs when the river was low. Susquehanna Bonefish. They're actually hard to catch that way and VERY spooky of the line. We had many hooks ups, screaming runs and great battles but I don't recall we ever actually landed one. Truth be told even the smaller chubs were fun and smallmouth were the best.
Last month we went for a drive and stopped at Mud Lock up at the head of Cayuga Lake where the NYS Barge Canal connects. There were carp swimming at the closed gate that were well over four feet long and a couple old, scarred submarines that looked to be all of five feet long. That's a real fish!