Norene Gilletz
Reprinted with permission from Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited by Arthur Schwartz, copyright © 2008. Published by Ten Speed Press.
Photo credit: Ben Fink © 2008"Food can connect us to our past. In fact, food is often our very last and only connection to our pasts, enduring long after the old language has been forgotten and other traditions have died. There’s many a Jew, for instance, who identifies as a Jew mainly through his or her love of pastrami, or potted brisket, or chicken soup with matzo balls."
In his poignant introduction, Arthur Schwartz invites his readers to join him on a wonderful, mouth-watering and sentimental journey through the memory-filled pages of his newest cookbook, Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited (Ten Speed Press, $35, color photographs by Ben Fink).
The book features nearly 100 authentic recipes for appetizers, soups, side dishes, meat main courses, dairy main courses, Passover dishes, baked goods and desserts. Schwartz embellishes simple ingredients with the wonderful stories behind the recipes and the people who have cooked and eaten them. The recipes are primarily Ashkenazic (Eastern-European), with adjustments and updates for how we eat today.
The Passover chapter of Jewish Home Cooking includes many of his childhood memories, including removing the regular dishes and pots down to the basement and carrying all the Passover dishes and pots back upstairs. This was his job - and he hated it! Arthur recalls: “We didn’t have carp swimming in the bathtub. My grandmother went to an old, reliable fish market where she could pick out the live fish from a big cement tank. I can still see her climbing the step up to the tank in her spiked heels, and with her long, well-manicured index finger, pointing to the specimen she wanted, then having the fish scaled and filleted on the spot. Of course, she kept the fish’s head, tail, and bones to make the broth that would later jell around her fish patties.”
The chapter devoted to Passover starts with the story of the holiday, including an explanation of how matzo is made. Schwartz writes, “Most commercial matzo is baked within seven minutes of being mixed with water, but the mixing equipment must be steam-washed between batches to ensure that no fermentation occurs.”
He includes his favorite Passover recipes, along with accompanying memories that will tug at your heartstrings, adding their own special ‘tam’ (flavor). Recipes include Matzo Brei (fried matzo), Matzo Farfel Kugel, Matzo Meal Latkes, Cottage Cheese Chremslach, My Family’s Passover Walnut Cake, Passover Mandelbread (from his mother’s handwritten recipe), Matzo Buttercrunch, Dried Fruit Compote, Wine-Poached Pears, and Ingberlach (his grandmother’s delicious matzo farfel candy made with honey and ginger).
Elsewhere in Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking are the recipes for some of the most popular Passover dishes, including brisket, chicken, and the special Passover borscht that was made with rosle, the juice of fermented beets. Schwartz also includes his schmaltz-filled memories of chicken fat rendering on the stove. Schmaltz was the most important cooking fat in old-time Jewish kitchens. He writes: “Although we rarely fry with it today, preferring less saturated vegetable oils, it is still a necessity for flavor. What are knaidlach without it? Just any old dumplings.”
Recipes are reprinted with permission from Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited by Arthur Schwartz, copyright © 2008. Published by Ten Speed Press.
ARTHUR SCHWARTZ’S GEFILTE FISH
Gefilte means "stuffed" in Yiddish. Nowadays, this iconic Jewish dish is fashioned into single-portion oval cakes and sometimes into "party-sized" loaves or tiny "cocktail balls." But originally, gefilte fish was packed back into the fish skin from whence the fish flesh came. For all the Borscht Belt jokes about its bad aroma, its gray color, and its too-often fishy flavor, when gefilte fish is well made, it is actually the most refined of Yiddish fare, a very highly manipulated way to serve freshwater fish elegantly, without their many bones. And it was meant to be fancy, because it was devised to be served on very festive occasions.
Once the fish's flesh is carefully separated from the bones, head, and tail, it is ground or chopped into a paste, seasoned well, possibly extended with a starchy ingredient (matzo meal and potatoes are the most usual), bound with eggs, then poached in a broth so rich in protein it jells when chilled.
Gefilte fish is the traditional Ashkenazic way to begin the Friday night Shabbos dinner. Sephardim have other fish preparations, but it is custom among all Jews to begin the Sabbath meal, the Passover seder, the Rosh Hashanah dinner, and, actually, any celebratory meal, with a fish course. As in Chinese tradition, fish symbolize prosperity and fertility. In some traditions, the head of the family is supposed to be served the head of the fish, and it still is the custom of some Jews, especially for Rosh Hashanah.
My Russian family tradition is for peppery gefilte fish, but many Jewish families with roots in Germany, Austria, and Poland prefer a sugar-sweetened fish. This difference in taste is typical of the two main divisions of Yiddish cooking: Litvak, referring to people who came from the easternmost areas of the Pale, and Galitzianer, referring specifically to Galicia, then part of the Austrian Empire, now divided between Poland and Ukraine, but also coming to mean all those who don't agree with Litvaks about the seasoning of food.
In the end, the Galitzianers have prevailed, probably because their taste for sweet food aligns with American taste. In New York City today, it is hard to find unsweetened gefilte fish. Every supermarket carries at least one, if not several, brands of gefilte fish, both peppered and "Vienna-style." But sweetened fish prevails in the few restaurants, delis, and appetizing stores that still make their own. These are of varying quality. Some, unfortunately, deserve the ridicule and embarrassment that Jews often make and have about this dish.
As preparing gefilte fish is something of a project - and an expensive one at that - many a balabusta gave in to the convenience of jarred gefilte fish when it was introduced in the 1950s. To assuage the guilt of not serving homemade fish - there is no other way to explain it - they would doctor the fish by recooking it in what amounted to a French-style court-bouillon. Of course, they didn't know they were making something called court-bouillon when they boiled water with a few vegetables and seasonings. Rather than "refresh" the fish, which is what everyone said they were doing, the fish became overcooked. Some brands of jarred gefilte fish are truly quite appealing, especially if you spike each bite with horseradish, the condiment that is the necessary accompaniment to gefilte fish.
In the following recipe, my grandmother's, I have added some contemporary cooking touches. There are instructions for using a food processor and a stand mixer for preparing the ground fish, and instructions for using the microwave to test the seasoning of the fish. In my grandmother's day it was apparently somewhat safer to taste raw freshwater fish, but today we are told that they may harbor parasites. The fish can actually be cooked entirely in the microwave, which results in a fresher tasting gefilte fish if you cook it until just done - a very different dish, but delicious.
Family traditions differ on the combination of fish used. Carp is relatively inexpensive compared to whitefish, pike, or perch. All-carp gefilte fish can be very dense and dark in color, but it is definitely to some people's taste - as are, if I might say disparagingly, hard matzo balls. Gefilte fish with no carp, just whitefish and pike, which is the most popular combination, can be very delicate. Some carp in the mix adds body.
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