The Gefilte Fish Chronicles

Yesterday my son-in-law Jesse (www.jessehertzberg.com) posted about my new blog. He also mentioned that he is “the world’s most enthusiastic lover of gefilte fish.” Sorry to say he’s never tasted my gefilte fish. For one thing, his wife, my daughter Gillian, is horribly allergic to fin fish. Second, the process of making gefilte fish is too painstaking and time-consuming.

How do I know? Many years ago, when I was fishing around (pun intended) in the food business to figure out where I wanted to stake a claim, I did some catering. A client wanted gefilte fish for one of the Jewish holidays.

Try to find carp in Fairfield county, Connecticut!

I wanted authentic gefilte fish. To me that meant carp, pike and whitefish. Off I went to Riverdale in the Bronx, where of course, a couple of fish stores had what was needed.

I minced the fish by hand. Food processed fish is too pasty.

I mixed that together with all the other ingredients and made stock with the bones and skin.

I shaped the mixture into small ovals and poached them to perfection in the stock.

If you go to a supermarket to buy gefilte fish, you’ll find them in jars, though some places have the homemade kind. Either way, what you see are overly large, grayish-beige pieces that aren’t at all appetizing. It’s no wonder that people who have never tasted gefilte fish grimace when you suggest that the stuff might actually taste good.

I wanted mine to look lovely. To be the Jewish equivalent that would look, smell and sound as enticing as the luxurious and legendary French Quenelles with Nantua Sauce.

I decorated each oval with a small tulip design carved from carrots and scallion greens. To hold the flowers in place I brushed them with strained, thickened fish stock.

They were gorgeous. They were tender, delicate and sumptuous. A wonder on the palate.

They had taken about 8 hours to prepare.

That was the first and last time for me. I now buy gefilte fish at Geshmake Fish on 236th Street in Riverdale. They sell it in a roll, not individual portions. It’s not homemade but it is quite good and only takes a 10 minute detour on my way home from New York City to my home in Connecticut.

The Morning Coffee Habit

I’m one of those people who needs coffee as soon as I wake up and then again a few times during the day. An addiction? Maybe. But this is the way it’s been since I was age five or six and my Aunt Roz and Uncle Mac came to live with us. They were newly married and hadn’t found living quarters. Aunt Roz, who loved children, volunteered to get up with us in the morning and get us ready for school.

Her idea of breakfast was coffee. To be fair, it was a lot of milk with coffee mixed in. But it was coffee just the same and that’s how the coffee thing started.

Right now I’m slowly sipping the morning brew, a blend of Hawaiian Rainforest and Brazilian that has a nice, rounded and pleasant taste. It’s a good combo for iced coffee too.

This morning’s coffee was made in my new electric coffee maker.  Last week I finally put away my beloved old coffeemaker. I say “beloved” because I’ve had it for over 15 years and “put away” because I couldn’t throw it out. It still works unbelievably well and is the best coffeemaker I ever had. It’s a Braun electric drip model that I bought after I tested one for an article I was writing for Consumer’s Digest Magazine.

This old thing never died and made perfect, hot coffee every time. I wish they still had that model (in stainless steel), but it no longer matched anything in my kitchen and everyone I knew made fun of me for keeping it so long.

Why throw something away when it still works?

So I didn’t. I put it in a cabinet in the garage just in case my new coffeemaker, which is beautiful and blends in with all the other appliances, doesn’t work out. So far, so good. The coffee this morning is delish.

My New Blog: Kitchen Vignettes

In my 30 years as a food journalist I’ve written articles about almost everything in the culinary world. What’s in season. What’s new. Holiday specialties. How-tos. And I’ve written about cookware and cookbooks and kitchen tools and about diets and health food.

I’ve seen trends come and go, new ingredients and new varieties of old ingredients appear in the market and so on and so on and so on. There’s a serious side to food journalism and I am proud to be part of it.

But what I have always found most appealing is the personal side of food writing. And I think other people do too. Of all the comments, letters and email I’ve received over the years, most have to do with the pieces I wrote about my own experiences. Like the time my Dad tried to fix our old Milkshake machine and somehow there were two extra pieces he couldn’t put back. And the time when my cousin and I went fishing, using twigs and diaper pins because we didn’t have real fishing rods.

I think people are interested in this stuff not because they are necessarily interested in me or even in the recipes that I always provide at the end. It’s just that my memories evoke someone else’s. It feels good to remember that grandma always made macaroni and cheese when you came to visit. It makes you laugh when you think back about the time you watched your big brother eat his first raw oyster. It makes you feel emotionally attached recalling that your best friend showed you how to eat with chopsticks.

Food memories can make you chuckle or cry. They bring moments of poignancy. My first food memory is from when I was 5 years old. Now I have a lifetime full of them.