![]() ![]() Gefilte fish is Yiddish for "stuffed fish." It's a staple of Jewish holiday tables around the world. "We also have whitefish that I picked up from the Jewish fishmonger this morning." She blends it all together in a food processor, along with fresh dill and watercress. We've got egg, onion, sugar, kosher salt, a little bit of white pepper," Alpern says. Alpern gave me a demonstration at a catering kitchen in Brooklyn. Alpern is half of the team behind the Gefilteria, which makes artisanal gefilte fish. That's a remarkable statement coming from someone in the gefilte fish business. I literally think I never ate it, until I started making it." I never ate gefilte fish," says Liz Alpern. The slimy, grey balls of fish from a jar have always struck me as icky. “It’s another thing to make something at a table, today, now, with your friends who are cool.20160913_atc_the_gefilte_manifesto_staples_of_the_jewish_table_rebooted.mp3įirst, a confession: I've never liked gefilte fish. “It’s one thing to make something and associate it with your grandmother,” Alpern says. But she says they’re not overly concerned about authenticity. The result is lighter, fresher and entirely less icky than the canned gefilte fish I grew up with.Ī lot of the recipes in The Gefilte Manifesto are about taking this food back to basics, says Alpern, with good, seasonal ingredients. Instead of poaching the gefilte fish in broth, the way most American Jews do, they bake it in a terrine. And Alpern says it also meant you could shop early and beat the holiday rush.Īlpern and Yoskowitz update their gefilte recipe with a trick from the Jews of Argentina. It helped to flush out the muddy flavor of a bottom-feeding fish like a carp. The stay in the bathtub accomplished a couple of goals. “The whole idea culturally is that this fish was so important to the holiday table - so critical, so sacred - that you would give up bathing for a week in order to have gefilte fish,” Alpern says. Alpern says this is a time-honored tradition that was brought over from the Old World. Yoskowitz remembers that his grandparents in Brooklyn would buy a live fish at the beginning for a week, and keep it in the bathtub until it was time to cook it. “Of all the Jewish foods,” Yoskowitz says, “this is the one that needed the most love.” And of course, three different recipes for gefilte fish. It’s got recipes for pastrami and pickles, brisket and blintzes, kugel and kreplach. That’s also the title of their new cookbook. When they were starting their business five years ago, Yoskowitz and Alpern wrote a mission statement that they called The Gefilte Manifesto. Yoskowitz and Alpern grew up eating traditional Jewish foods at home in the suburbs of New York. And that became our mission: to sort of revitalize this cuisine.” We were making all sorts of pickles and sauerkraut. “We both had a love for these food traditions, and we didn’t want to see these traditions die with the older generation,” Yoskowitz says. But Alpern and her business partner, Jeffrey Yoskowitz, say it doesn’t have to be. Ashkenazi cuisine in this country has earned a reputation for being heavy, monochromatic and bland. But it is not so beloved by their American descendants. To Ashkenazi Jews from eastern Europe, it was a delicacy. Gefilte fish is Yiddish for “stuffed fish.” It’s a staple of Jewish holiday tables around the world. “We also have whitefish that I picked up from the Jewish fishmonger this morning.” She blends it all together in a food processor, along with fresh dill and watercress. We’ve got egg, onion, sugar, kosher salt, a little bit of white pepper,” Alpern says. That’s a remarkable statement coming from someone in the gefilte fish business. I literally think I never ate it, until I started making it.” I never ate gefilte fish,” says Liz Alpern. First, a confession: I’ve never liked gefilte fish. ![]()
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