Boned and buttered perch does not only describe a way of serving fish. It defines a whole meal that has been popular along the southern shore of Lake Michigan for a century. The small panfish are cooked the way fishermen used to prepare them when South Chicago and Gary, Indiana, still were a kind of fisherman’s paradise. The fillets are lightly breaded in seasoned flour and fried in a skillet. Restaurants used to give diners a choice: whole or boned, plain from the skillet or drizzled with melted butter. Nowadays, the few places that continue to serve them do it only boned and almost always buttered, offering them either by the plate (up to ten) or on an all-you-can-eat plan. The flesh of perch is firm and compact, flaking into tiny sections when prodded with a fork; the meat seems to draw melting butter deep into its crevices, creating unspeakable luxury.
The proper collective noun for multiple perch fillets is mess. Bruce Bilmes photographed this mess in northern Indiana.
The joy of eating boned and buttered perch includes not only the sublime taste of the fish itself but also the traditional five-relish array at the beginning of the meal—cottage cheese, pickled beets, potato salad, coleslaw, and kidney bean salad—along with such old-school highballs as neat martinis with olives, sweet Manhattans with maraschino cherries, Tom Collinses, and Rob Roys. Every menu that features perch also offers frog legs—another delicacy once appreciated by local fishermen but now more a culinary anachronism.