Cooking my way back to the faith... with gefilte fish

Yeah, sure. It is meaningful to me too. I recall it sliced onto finger rolls and served at room temperature (120 Fahrenheit) on top of the walnut television cabinet in the flat of my great-aunt who survived Auschwitz, and whatever she fed us was a blessing.

I recall balls of it served at shivas at the massive Elstree house of my great-uncle, the one with an actual snooker room (different side of the family, settled earlier, did well, never made it to Auschwitz), that my cousin and me made faces about and then used as ping-pong balls (for he had a table tennis table too).

And they worked exceedingly well, although they made grease spots on the playing surface and the Shabbos goy chased us out with a mop.

I even recall eating the stuff. The unforgettable flavour of cold, muddy fish mixed with sugar reminding me how lucky I was to lead a modern, secular life that meant I didn’t have to eat like this every day, and providing a deeper understanding of why my parents, brought up frum in the 1940s and 1950s, had lapsed so fast and so hard.

Nothing made me feel more Jewish, mostly in a bad way but also in a sneakily different and, I suppose, superior way, than chewing on a gefilte fish ball.

The very idea of my friends at boarding school — blond-haired oafs with foreskins and ancestral homes in the Scottish borders — eating these cold, sugary cod spheres, perhaps with a shmear of chrain was… absolutely impossible.

But it never occurred to me to make gefilte fish balls. Out of what? You don’t make gefiltefish balls; you buy them at Panzer’s. You don’t create them yourself, from raw materials, the same way you don’t make your own Wotsits, trainers or iPhones.

They come from a factory, very possibly a ping-pong ball factory, and you do not ask questions.

But the point of this column is to cook my way back to the faith.

So I took out my Claudia (the name stands in metonymically for Ms Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food and one consults her as one consults Fowler, Drabble or Erskine May) and there, of course, were a couple of pages on the hows and the whys.

First surprise: gefilte fish used to be made by mashing up the fish’s flesh (traditionally river and lake fish but latterly saltwater fish too, as long as kosher — no shark or eel balls, please) with matzah meal, onion, sugar and salt and then stuffing it back into the corpse of the fish, like some sort of fish glove puppet.

I’m sorry, but how can a huge dead lake fish,

its insides removed, and mashed with bread and onion, the mixture then cunningly slid back into the boneless skin to look like a fish again, be considered kosher, while a cute little prawn cocktail is off limits? Madness.

Second surprise: only Polish Jews put sugar in. Guilty as charged, I guess. Nice to know that the flavour I recall ties in with the Corens’ ancestral home in Plonsk (have I told you that my Great Grampa Harry was in cheder there with a young David Ben-Gurion? I believe I have. And I will again).

The Russians, Lithuanians and the rest all eat their gefilte fish unsweetened. Lucky buggers.

Third surprise: the fried gefilte fish ball is a uniquely British innovation, tying in with the storied birth of fish and chips in the old East End. Everyone else eats them boiled and set in aspic with little carrot hats on.

So I decided that, being Polish, I had better sugar my balls, and, being British, I should probably just fry them and not attempt the aspic thing. But then I decided that was too easy, so I decided to do both.

In the absence of carp at my local fishmonger, I bought a fillet of hake, and asked for its head — its massive, Tolkien-ish, snapping head — for the stock.

I dropped the giant cartoonish fish face into a pot with a quartered onion and
two carrots, sliced finely to create little orange yarmulkes for each ball, plus salt, pepper and, er, sugar, covered the lot with water and set over a flame.

While that roiled on the hob, I blended another onion, two eggs, salt, pepper, the hake fillet and, er, sugar, in the Nutribullet (because it’s the closest thing we have to a food processor — my wife expressly told me not to put fish in her precious juicer, but then she went out), mixed it with medium matzah meal, rolled the mix into 14 balls and refrigerated.

I tasted the stock: good, rich, fishy and, er, sweet. Disgusting? Yes. Wait, no. It’s OK. In fact, slurp, it’s kind of good. Slurp, slurp. In fact, it’s delicious! It’s basically hake syrup, what’s not to adore?

Long story short: I strained the stock and tossed the head into the garden (Claudia says “it’s a delicacy” but I let the foxes decide about that) then simmered my balls in it for half an hour, laid them in a glass dish to cool, then submerged them to the neck in the cooled stock, covered from Hashem with their little orange skullcaps, and placed in the fridge overnight to set.

A palaver, you might think. But if all you had was pike or perch or carp, bought from the travelling fishmonger, still living, in a bucket of water, purged of mud for three days in water, still alive, in your shtetl scullery, but still basically a sockful of bones, this is what you would have had to do to make it palatable.

Except for the sugar, which is a questionable call. Looked at another way, this is but the Ashkenazi version of the great French pike dish quenelle de brochet.

In the morning, when I went to inspect, the fridge smelt of pure Judaism: wonderful, sweet, nostalgic but also complex and a little scary. The aspic was set, and also blue. Why blue?

“Because that’s the colour of the hake’s head,” said my shiksa wife, who is nonetheless probably right.

I had set some balls aside to fry, just in case, and we started with those. Half a bottle of vegetable oil into a small saucepan, two at a time, five minutes, out, dry, cool a little and… absolutely delicious!

Definitely a gefilte fish ball: sweet, a bit dry, full of memories, but also fresh and natural and real-tasting, which you don’t get from the factory ones.

Admittedly, they were still seductively warm, not chilled on a windowsill overnight and eaten after shul just as the bounce was setting in, but… a revelation.

Esther and I piled through the lot with glee, and some radishes, which seemed a suitable shtetly side veg.

And now to the boiled ones in aspic. “You first,” said Esther, as I spooned one out of the dish with a “thwuuuuuulch!”, a good dollop of clear blue jelly still attached, and dropped it on her plate.

“OK,” I said, and took one for myself: “Thwuuuulch!” I sliced into it: a clean, grey, grainy edge. I put a slice in my mouth.

Cool, bland… but then the aspic melted and provided salty sweet lubrication. I bit in and found it to be nothing more nor less than… “A fish-flavoured kneidl!” And quite edible. As opposed to very edible.

“Hmmm,” said Esther, chewing but not swallowing. “I prefer the fried ones.” “Try them with some chrain,” I said.

For I had made chrain. Oh yes, I had. A grated lump of fresh horseradish, some beetroot grated in for colour, salt, pepper, lemon juice and, of course, sugar.

“Yikes!” she said, taking too much and getting the full heat of the fresh root.

“That is terrifying stuff. But it does take the flavour of animal face away.”

Still hungry and hankering after more of the fried balls, no doubt on account of being a Londoner, I plucked the remaining boiled ones from the aspic, rinsed them under the tap, rolled them in matzo meal and deep fried them in the oil that I had cunningly not thrown away.

This time, we snarfed them down with sriracha, Jamaican hot pepper sauce and a couple of cold lagers. Because Jewish cuisine is nothing, I am beginning to realise, if not adaptable.