The term “Jewish food” covers a wide swath of unique dishes from all over the world, and perhaps no holiday better exemplifies that variety than Passover. A seder table will have dishes on it that are familiar Jewish favorites, like matzo ball soup, as well as Passover-specific dishes like charoset.
However, each year, there is one dish that spurs more conversation than others in many households.
Gefilte fish is loved by some and hated by many others. The dish consists of ground whitefish, onions, eggs and matzo meal, with all of those ingredients combined into a lump and poached in broth.
Some people might picture a slimy, gelatinous ball that comes out of a jar when they think of gefilte fish, which is not necessarily wrong. For many families, gefilte fish preparation is as simple as removing it from the jar and placing a sliced carrot on top. It’s an afterthought — not the star of the show.
What is left is not the most appetizing-looking dish, regardless of how you feel about its flavor. For that reason, as well as others, it is usually referred to as a dish with an acquired taste, and one that might not be popular with the youngest children.
But, at seders across the country, Jews of all ages dig into gefilte fish around Passover because of its unique taste or memories associated with the dish and the holiday.
For those who love it, what makes it special? And how can the dish be changed so your seder table can enjoy it too?
For Shlomo Fixler, who serves as catering manager at The Knish Shop in Pikesville, the recipe is simple. They serve gefilte fish all year round, although things definitely get busier this time of year as demand goes up.
Typically, the Knish Shop uses eight to 10 pounds of whitefish a week for its gefilte. It’s ground traditionally, with spices and bread crumbs, before being formed into long logs wrapped in parchment paper.
The logs go into some water, go into the oven, get sliced and then come out wrapped with a carrot on top for consumption.
Fixler said he enjoys the dish because it is “a Jewish comfort food. It’s nostalgic, and it’s great because I like putting things on top of it. It’s about more than the flavor. The nostalgia has a stronghold.”
For Micah Siva, a nationally-known Jewish food blogger based in Chicago, gefilte fish holds a lot more meaning, which, in turn, means her version of the dish is prepared with more care. After all, she learned from a long lineage of hardworking women who were talented in the kitchen.
“In my family, gefilte fish is pretty sacred,” she said.
Siva’s great-grandmother escaped from pogroms in Eastern Europe before moving to the Winnipeg area with her husband and four children.
Despite social pressures of the time, Siva’s ancestor was not afraid to divorce her husband and take her kids with her to Northern Canada when she felt that was best.
Soon, the Jewish woman and her kids were living in Northern Saskatchewan. She put food on the table by acting as an intermediary between fur trappers and fur traders. The cold Canadian waters also provided a litany of options for amazing whitefish — species that some may prefer to the carp of Eastern Europe. The result was an amazing recipe that the family took years to reproduce.
“[My great-grandmother] began making her own gefilte fish based on her family’s recipe using those fish. My mom and grandma took about eight to 10 years to perfect the written recipe of my great-grandmother’s,” she said. “We would have these big bowls, with my mom and grandmother elbows deep with fish flown in from Northern Saskatchewan, making huge batches every year to try and replicate what my great-grandmother did.”
Delicious, yes. But the process is about more than that, according to Siva.
“It was always the crown jewel of our Passover seder, because it would always come along with the story of my great-grandmother and a way to remember her,” she said.
Homemade gefilte fish, obviously, takes on the taste of what you add to it. For that reason, it might be a good way to introduce younger generations to a more palatable version of the dish.
Siva said that it isn’t all that different from a fish patty, and if you want to go that direction, parsley, dill, cilantro, garlic and hot peppers are all great additions.
She’s even made vegan versions of the dish, which she said is a good way for those with alternative diets to feel included.
For traditionalists, though, the dish is great how it is, although that’s not to say it isn’t a little strange. After all, necessity breeds innovation.
“I think if you didn’t grow up with it, it’s a lot harder to get into,” Fixler said. “People in Europe didn’t have enough money for fish. They would grind little bits up with bread crumbs.”
He laughed at an anecdote he recalled.
“I’ve seen non-Jewish people on the internet try Jewish food, and a lot of them [they like], but you get to the [gefilte fish], and then…,” he trailed off before making a noise mimicking the repulsion of a non-Jew trying the dish.
“Like most Jewish food, gefilte fish came out of a time of scarcity,” Siva said. “They were trying to stretch the fish [by mixing] it with other things, then stuffing it back into the fish skin so there would be more to go around the table. The scarcity of those years is very different from our access to food these days, and so it really is like a piece of history on your table.”
While younger generations of Jews might not be clamoring for the gefilte fish portion of the seder, Fixler doesn’t think the dish is going anywhere. The world is changing, but Jews place a high value on history and tradition.
“Over the past 10 to 15 years, [substituting gefilte fish] with something like salmon has really grown. I think it will come back around, though, because Jews have a way of taking our foods and elevating them,” he said. “Gefilte fish is losing some in terms of market share, but I don’t think it will ever totally disappear.”
Siva comes from a long line of gefilte lovers.
