Edition: U.S. / Global

FARE OF THE COUNTRY; The Succulent Walleye of the Midwest

Published: May 5, 1991

ONLY someone who had once voluntarily moved from Arizona to Nebraska in the middle of winter would get as excited about a trip to Michigan as I did last summer. Not only did the state seem exotically Midwestern, but its food had fascinated me for all the years I had been stuffing files full of stories about the cherries and asparagus, the wild mushrooms and baby vegetables, even the dried beans.

When friends finally enticed me to their cottage on Lake Huron, though, I got two surprises. The good one was that the cottage was actually a seven-bedroom Victorian right on the water at Pointe Aux Barques, with both a grill in the backyard and a good restaurant nearby. The bad one was that it happened to be at the tip of what Michiganders call the thumb of their mitten-shaped state. And no matter how beautiful it might be, it was hours and hours away from cherries or asparagus or wild mushrooms, let alone squash nurseries.

By the time I touched ground in Michigan, I had resigned myself to exploring the possibilities of the country's biggest bean crop. But I was spared when I met the cottage's other guests, a Grosse Pointe couple who had spent days considering what to cook for a New Yorker in search of real local food. The Michigan wine they picked up at the Eastern Farmers' Market sounded great, but I had my doubts about their plans for a big dinner of Great Lakes fish.

Fried walleye, after all, does not exactly sound as appetizing as cherry pie.

But all it took was a few bites to give me a taste for this Midwestern staple with the weird name and the firm, moist flesh. I used to say I had never met a fish I didn't like better with tartar sauce. But walleye was so succulent and clean-tasting, like a really juicy halibut fillet, that it never needed more than a brush of butter before cooking and my reflexive sprinkling of salt afterward. The one time I had it breaded and deep-fried, in fact, I wound up peeling off the crust and savoring the naked flesh while the tartar sauce congealed on the table.

Walleye is apparently most plentiful in cooler weather, but it was still prominently listed on every menu of every restaurant I tried that week. In the small towns it was billed as walleye, a name most sources link to its prominent eyes, and in Detroit it changed to slightly more euphonious pickerel.

Beside its names, walleye's weirdest trait is that it usually cannot be bought in the small towns along Lake Huron. It might be swimming in schools a few hundred yards from a cottage, but by state law only sport fishermen can catch it. Restaurants have to import their fillets from wholesalers who deal with commercial fishermen working lakes in Canada.

That policy meant my nonfishing hosts could get all the great beef, pork and hot dogs they wanted from lakeside butchers, but it also meant I never got my home-cooked walleye supper, with fillets right off the boat and grill. Instead we wound up driving into Port Austin to a restaurant called The Bank, in an 1884 building in the center of the tiny town. In an airy room hung with blowups of historic happenings on the lake, we sampled walleye two ways: broiled and paired with a lemon-dill sauce, and baked en papillote, with crabmeat and shrimp in a parchment packet. Either would give wok-seared tuna a run for the Gold Card in a big city, especially with the side dishes of sourdough bread and herb butter and fat baked potatoes with sour cream.

After that meal, none of us could even contemplate cherry pie.

In trying to make up for lost morels and asparagus, I left my friends' cottage compound early and headed back to Detroit with a detour through a bustling little town called Frankenmuth that boasts of being the fried-chicken capital of the world but naturally serves walleye as well. Two sprawling restaurants, Zehnder's and the Bavarian Inn, face each other across Main Street and compete for the most all-you-can-eat meals served in a given year.

The Friday lunch special of battered walleye certainly made it easy to see how they packed in the crowds. For $9.95, the 1,300-seat Zehnder's served "all you care to eat" of walleye fillets (or cod, or both) with tartar sauce and lemon, french fries, coleslaw and stollen and regular bread with butter and fruit preserves. The four huge fillets of fish were buried in all the breading, but it didn't disappoint me. Since my consort went for the $10.95 chicken, our table also overflowed with cheddar cheese spread and chicken liver pate, chicken noodle soup, pickles, cottage cheese, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, chunky carrots, egg noodles and ice cream.

We moaned in misery all the 80-some miles down Interstate 75 to Detroit, but somehow managed to recover in time for dinner at Tres Vite, a restaurant newly opened by Jimmy Schmidt, the chef in the baseball cap who made his name at the London Chop House there and now owns the Rattlesnake Club on the riverfront.

This was our first encounter with pickerel, but he explained later that only the name had changed, even though some distributors, such as those at Chicago Fish House in a city on another Great Lake, insist the two are different species. "Almost all commercial pickerel sold in the Midwest is yellow walleye," Mr. Schmidt says. "The fishermen got everything screwed up, by saying that's a pike (another type of fish) or that's a walleye."