Food&drink

Making Passover food more elegant, less oily

Aunt Lil’s chicken soup, for instance, was the first thing Gray put on the holiday menu — but he incorporated foie gras in his version of the matzo balls. “Jewish food gone elegant,” Kassoff said, describing her husband’s approach.

His riff on the traditional potato latkes served at Hanukkah is Yukon Gold and sweet potato latkes with horseradish cream and salmon caviar. The dish was inspired by an invitation Gray received years ago to the home of his future in-laws during Hanukkah, as Gray recounts in the book. Kassoff ’s father, Ed, was to prepare his “famous latkes.”

“Watching Ellen’s father make those latkes, I remember thinking, ‘That’s so much oil,’ ” he writes. “So I said, as delicately as possible, ‘ You know, Ed, you could probably get by using a lot less oil. You don’t really have to submerge them.’ He looked at me like I was crazy — but now he makes them the way I do.”

Tasting pickled or creamed herring at Kassoff brunches, Gray found it “oily, fishy and tart from vinegar.” So he gave it what he calls “a little bit of an upgrade” by mixing it with crème fraîche, citrus zest and dill and garnishing it with segments of orange, lemon and lime. The recipe is in the cookbook, as is Gray’s take on beef brisket, an iconic dish at many Jewish holiday tables.

Gray braises it with red wine, veal stock and balsamic vinegar, then presses the meat down with weights and refrigerates it “to compact it and press out excess fat.” Afterward, the meat is cut into fiveounce blocks and reheated in the braising liquid, which has been strained and reduced. “It’s an elegant, modern version of brisket,” Gray writes.

Kassoff ’s Aunt Lil used to makegefiltefish—white-fleshed fish that is ground, formed into balls and cooked slowly in stock — from scratch. But Kassoff recalls that her mother would use commercially prepared gefilte fish. She “embraced the jarred version completely, even keeping it on hand as a fridge snack,” she writes.

It should be said that gefilte fish is a grey/beige shade some find unappetizing — and that the often-gelatinous stock in which the fish balls sit is not everyone’s cup of tea.

“Nestled on a lettuce leaf and garnished with little piles of white or red horseradish,” Kassoff writes, “gefilte fish made regular appearances on our family’s table at holiday meals, where attendees invariably divided into two groups: the ‘I love gefilte fish!’ contingent and the ‘ How can you eat that disgusting stuff ?’ group.”

Gray “definitely fell into the latter camp ... To me, gefilte fish out of a jar is an abomination,” he writes in the introduction to his own take on the dish, “an interpretation of quenelles de brochet” featuring ground sea bass, pike and flounder mixed with matzo meal, herbs and lemon zest and poached in homemade fish stock, then baked.

“Actually, one of the pivotal dishes that made Todd want to do a culinary makeover was gefilte fish,” Kassoff said when we spoke.