It’s one of those snapshot memories, a stop-motion image from childhood that I sometimes take out this time of year. In it, several women are standing around a white Formica dining room table. Newspaper covers every inch of the table and an old hand-cranked fish grinder sits on one edge. The air is filled with chatter … chatter and an odor. An awful odor. A god-awful smell that danced up from that rickety old machine and over to my poor five-year-old nose. It’s my only recollection of the Great Kanter Family Gefitle Fish Fiasco — the only bit of memory I still can conjure up from horribly smelly time my mother and her friends tried to make gefilte fish from scratch in my family’s Queens apartment.
The story goes that my mother, who hates to cook and who proudly wears the label of bad cook, decided to take a stab at making from-scratch gefilte fish for the Jewish holidays. It went all kinds of wrong. The cause of death always cited in this story is that the group used the wrong kind of fish. Judging from the smell, that was not the only thing wrong with the fish. That recipe fail was enough to sour me on the popular Ashkenazi holiday appetizer for a long time to come.
Ten years later, my mother unknowingly stumbled up a way to finally serve good homemade gefilte fish. She purchased it. Not the terrible-looking jarred stuff, but actual fresh sweet gefilte fish complete with the spirit of the Old Country.
In Queens at the time, small kosher prepared food markets dotted many neighborhoods including one near my own. The kitchens often were staffed with women who recently had emigrated from the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. Queens of then and now was a melting pot of people and their cuisines. The gefilte fish makers were just one of many examples of this.
For the holidays, my mother started ordering loaves of sweet gefilte fish made by the women who worked in these kitchens along with their less inspired premade matzo balls, chicken soup, roast chicken, and the occasional tough piece of brisket. One particular shop made it better and a tad sweeter than the other, so it had our regular business. The loaves wrapped in white butcher paper were my first exposure to the intention of the dish as something to be savored. It also let me see that gefitle fish could be delicious — to say nothing of odor-free.
