Pickerel Cheeks and Wild Rice with a Creamy Morel Vermouth Sauce

Inspired by the wild foods of Manitoba, this recipe highlights the flavor of walleye with wild rice and mushrooms

I know, I know; they’re not pickerel, they’re walleye. Growing up in Ontario though, pickerel was what they were called by pretty much anyone I heard talking about them. Same thing in Manitoba, whose wild food landscape this recipe was inspired by. 

It wasn’t until I went to college for natural resources that I made the connection – pickerel and walleye were the same fish! 

I’d always wondered why anglers on the odd fishing show I watched were catching these “walleye” fish that looked so similar to the pickerel I caught in nearby rivers. Being in a pre-Google era, I just stayed in the dark like a naïve dummy. Funny to think back on how much harder it was back then to figure things out. 

But why do so many Canadians call walleye “pickerel”? It’s obviously the wrong name, since walleye is the official common name for Sander vitreus. 

First of all, there are no actual chain pickerel (a northern pike relative) in most of Canada’s waters, other than a few examples of invasive ones in the south. This could have led to walleye being named pickerel colloquially by northern fishermen since there was nothing else to confuse it with. 

I gleaned from some online sources that the term pickerel was often used as a collective term for any fish that wasn’t bass or catfish. So maybe most fish were pickerel for a time, then the walleye ended up as sole inheritor of the name when the other fish were eventually labelled. 

Sometimes, colloquial names just stick. When I lived in Alberta, northern pike were often called “jacks” or “jackfish”. In Quebec, walleye are often called doré, meaning gold; a nod to walleye’s yellow fins and sides. Poking around online, I can see that in some places, walleye are known as yellow pikeperch. Maybe that was from some European influence? 

I think that in the end, it all really comes down to stubbornness. Just like grouse came to be known as partridge in most of Canada and the eastern States, walleye came to be known as pickerel, and there ain’t nobody who’s going to change it, even if we all know that grouse aren’t partridge, and walleye aren’t pickerel. These were old school names passed through generations and stubbornly held on to despite evidence proving it wrong. 

That is… until this generation seemingly decided they’ve had enough. 

Anecdotally, I see more and more younger hunters and anglers switching to the proper common names of oft-misnamed species, including walleye. I’m not sure if that is because of television and the internet, hammering the real names home, or if more younger folks are better educated in the natural resources field. It’s hard to say.

In the end, it doesn’t REALLY matter, other than as bar room banter, but I won’t lie – when I hear someone say partridge instead of grouse, I get a gross little shiver down my spine. 

So, after all of that, why did I name this recipe “Pickerel Cheeks” instead of walleye? 

Well, as I mentioned earlier, it’s because this recipe was inspired by the wild food of Manitoba. Morel mushrooms, indigenous-harvested wild rice, and “pickerel” cheeks were all foods I sampled while traveling across that lovely province, so I wanted to make a dish that incorporated all of them into one. 

Consequently, here is my misnomered take on Pickerel Cheeks à la Manitoba. Enjoy!