Gefilte fish (was Re: [Sca-cooks] Jewish Haiku)

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Brighid writes:
>On 16 Feb 2002, at 10:58, Seton1355 at aol.com wrote:
>
>>  Ok , now a question. I have been trying to find the earliest reference
>>  to gefillte fish being served in Period.  So far no luck.... Has
>>  anyone got a reference? Phillipa
>
>There are period Lenten recipes for fish balls of various kinds.  I
>don't know if gefilte fish as a Jewish dish is period.

>171 Stuffed pike
>
>Stuffed pike is made like so: Cut the pike open a little along the
>side, put a knife into it and cut out the large bones at the neck
>and peel the skin off of the pike, so that the skin remains whole.
>Then take the pike and remove the bones, chop the flesh, put milk
>into it and carp blood, and season it and stuff it again into the
>skin, yet the head and tail remain on the skin. Do not oversalt it
>and sew it closed again with coarse silk and roast it on a grill.
>And when it is roasted, then draw the string out again.

 From Valoise Arnstrong's translation of Welserin... obviously this is
very much treif, but it _is_ fish, and it _is_ gefilte, so I suppose
it is a step in the right direction. Even I've seen modern recipes
for gefilte fish which are actually the fish converted to a stuffing
and put back in its skin (usually a sort of galantine or sausage,
rather than a whole, stuffed-fish-subtlety-type thing -- interesting
in that this makes a wonderful service expedient, but that the
practice may have been abandoned _as a service expedient_, in other
words, going to individual-serving balls with the skin only used to
gel the stock).

I'm interested in the use of carp blood in this, not only because
it's treif, but also because carp blood (could this be a
mistranslation?) is pretty notoriously bad-tasting, or so I gather.
Certainly the usual recommendation for cooking carp is to bleed the
fish pretty well to avoid a gamy flavor, but then the French make a
civey of carp, which includes the blood as a thickener. So why not
simply use the blood of the pike, which you're killing anyway? Or is
that not enough?

Adamantius