Gefilte fish divide: Line separates sweet, savoury preferences
At sundown March 30, Jews will sit together at the Seder table for the most observed Jewish holiday of the year — Passover — which celebrates spring and the rebirth of the tribe as a free people after slavery in Egypt.
Everyone has favourite Seder foods, but probably not the unappetizing ready-to-serve gefilte fish balls from a jar.
In the Old Country, I bet it tasted pretty good. Housewives chopped the flesh of fresh fish with onions, matzo and seasonings, and stuffed the mixture back into fish skin, which had been pulled off from head to tail, down from the neck. The fish was sewn or tied shut, then baked in an oven or simmered in fish stock. The subtle taxidermic result of presenting a sewn-up fish disappeared long ago. Now, we’re poaching the stuffing, or, thanks to a rising interest, baking the stuffing in a terrine. Yet, Jews kept the name gefilte, meaning stuffed in Yiddish.
My mother, who wasn’t exactly focused on flavour, probably thought those darling little fish torpedoes suspended in a glass jar of gelled broth were the Cadillac of gefilte fish, made barely palatable with horseradish. That’s all I ever knew. Until my husband and I hosted a Seder and I could pull out the 24-karat-gold-rimmed plates my maternal grandparents brought from Czechoslovakia. Didn’t such precious Bohemian dinnerware deserve more than the flavourless dumplings from a jar?
Fortunately, a guest insisted on bringing gefilte fish made from scratch; it was lighter, fluffier and awakened an appreciation of what was surely good about gefilte fish in the first place — it had taste!
But this one was sweet, a travesty to a couple of guests from Belarus who mumbled something like ‘what’s the sugar doing in the fish?’
And therein lies the gefilte fish divide: a kind of Mason-Dixon Line between sweet and savoury, running north-to-south through Central Europe. In 1965, linguist Marvin Herzog identified this border in “The Yiddish Language in Northern Poland: Its Geography and History”: “Sweetened fish, also called pojlise fis (Polish fish), is generally unpalatable to those east of the indicated border who prefer their fish seasoned only with pepper.”
West of the line is Galicia, modern-day southern Poland, where sugar beets grew well. Gil Marks wrote in the “Encyclopedia of Jewish Food” that once the techniques were developed to produce sucrose from the beet’s long white roots, the first sugar beet-refining factory opened in Silesia, Germany (now southwestern Poland). Others followed.
East of the line, sugar was too expensive, either because the beet grew poorly or local authorities refused to build sugar beet factories. So, Lithuanians, Latvians and Russians loved their gefilte with a peppery passion, with a side of khreyn, pungent horseradish root.
At the turn of the 20th century, a huge wave of immigrants to America settled in urban centres. Jews could not ignore the tastes they knew.
After a century of marriages between Jews, many recipes now reveal both sugar and a kick of pepper. Yet there’s a more contemporary approach that avoids the labour-intensive method of poaching gefilte in a homemade stock: bake the dish in a terrine. It slices beautifully.
Baked Terrine Makes 8 to 10 servings
1 small onion, coarsely chopped
12 ounces whitefish fillet, skin and bones removed, flesh coarsely chopped
4 1⁄2 teaspoons vegetable or grapeseed oil
1 large egg
2 tablespoons each, coarsely chopped: watercress, dill 1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp kosher salt
1⁄8 tsp freshly ground white pepper
Prep: 25 minutes, plus cooling time; cook: 40 to 45 minutes
1. Position a rack in the middle of the oven; heat to 350 F.
2. In a food processor, process the onion until finely ground and mostly liquefied. Add fish fillets and remaining ingredients; pulse until mixture is light-coloured and evenly textured throughout. Put into a bowl, stir to combine thoroughly.
3. Grease an 8-by-3-inch loaf pan; fill with the fish mixture. Smooth top with a spatula.
4. Place the loaf pan on a baking sheet; bake in centre of oven until corners and ends begin to brown, 40 to 45 minutes. Remove the loaf from oven; cool to room temperature before inverting onto a plate and slicing.
Per serving (for 10 servings):
80 calories, 5 grams fat, 1 g saturated fat, 40 milligrams cholesterol, 2 g carbohydrates, 2 g sugar, 7 g protein, 217 mg sodium, 0 g fibre