Gefilte Fish

This week's Recipeshed theme is seafood. Well I do fish, but I don't do seafood. And tbh, although I love eating well cooked fish, I don't often cook it myself as I'm a bit scared of it. I have a number of quick things to do with a tin of tuna and I can buy vacuum-packed smoked salmon from the deli along with the best of them. But it's Recipeshed innit? Gotta be something special...

Made into balls

So I thought I'd talk about gefilte fish. The recipe is very approximate because I'm not actually going to make it and neither are you. I have made it in the past. When I worked for a caterer in Jerusalem we made vast quantities of both the Polish (sweet) and the Lithuanian (peppery) kind every week. My mother and all her generation made it regularly. Nowadays most people buy it ready made or in a jar from the Jewish Deli. And the photos are Google Images.

Along with cholent, kugel, tsimmes, and beigels, gefilte fish is a quintessential Jewish food, albeit an unlikely delicacy. A dense doughy concoction of chopped and boiled white fish. Why would we? Well it's tradition innit? Originally a collection of all the leftover bits of white fish (mainly carp), minced up, mixed with breadcrumbs, eggs, salt and pepper, and stuffed into another fish. Gefilte means stuffing in Yiddish - now you know why. Eventually the stuffed fish was left out and the fish stuffing, or gefilte fish, was made into balls or a loaf which is sliced to serve.

This is what you do: mince your white fish with the ingredients mentioned above. Then you form balls and drop them into boiling stock (made with the fish heads, carrots, celery, onions, parsley, salt, and loads of sugar or pepper, depending on your ancestral affiliations - see above). Let it simmer for about two hours. Serve cold with a little carrot hat on each piece. The old joke goes: How do gefilte fish keep their carrot hats on when they're swimming about in the water?

Bought in a jar

And if all this isn't delicious enough, you can leave it in the fridge overnight covered in some of the stock so that the stock cools to an aspic jelly. Either you like the jelly of you don't. Many people discard the stock. I like to reheat it and drink it as a fish consomme - a sort of bouillabaisse if you will.

The traditional condiment is chrain - chopped horseradish, beetroot, white vinegar and sugar. You can see it in the photo of the sliced gefilte fish above. Also best to buy it.

So there you have it - what we and hundreds of other Jewish families serve as an hors d'ouvres for a truly festive meal. And... we love it!