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

[Philip & Susan Troy]

>I asked the SCA-Judaica list the same question and some people said that
>"jewish" recipes were just kosher versions of country-of-origin recipes,
>which I tend to agree with.
>
>From what I read about gefillte fish along the way all these years, it seems
>that gefillte fish came about for the Jews as a way to have a fish dish on
>the Sabbath when no cooking was allowed and also to "dress up" the taste of
>what was basicly considered trash fish. (although this last idea could be
>mainly 19th C thinking)
>Phillipa

Certainly it would make sense. Not only is it fairly labor-intensive,
so it should be made in advance for holiday use, but it keeps quite
well, also, so it _can_ be made in advance, even in the days before
artificial refrigeration.

As for the trash fish question, that may even be a 20th-century
concept. In general modern people are not only pathologically afraid
of bones, but utterly ignorant of how to deal with them if they end
up on your plate. Carp were being raised in Germany and elsewhere in
vivaria in the Middle Ages, which, assuming they were more than just
ornamental fish, would support the idea that they were actually
preferred, for various reasons. There are a number of classic dishes
in Eastern European cuisines (not to mention China) where it seems to
be sort of assumed that carp is the fish you'll use (note that pike,
another popular gefilte-fish candidate, is another fish with a lot
of, and somewhat oddly-placed, bones -- you get five oddly-shaped
boneless fillets off a pike if you do it right, as opposed to two off
most other fish). This may be because the dishes evolved in places
where carp were prevalent, but what is clear is that the prep and
cooking methods frequently seem to take carp's boniness and gaminess
into account: there's frequently very specific boning, trimming, or
marination instructions, sometimes a long cooking to dissolve bones,
etc. But none of them seem to say, take this kind of fish, or, if you
can't get anything better, use a carp.

Adamantius, who likes gefilte fish made from walleye, a.k.a. yellow
pike, which is actually a perch