Take 2 pounds of trout and 2 pounds of red fish; cut in two-inch slices. Remove the skin from one side of the slices. Chop 2 onions; add salt, pepper and mix with fine cracker-crumbs and 1 egg to a paste. Lay the paste on the fish and put back the skin. Boil the fish with salt, pepper and sliced onion, 1 carrot and 2 sprigs of parsley cut fine, a pinch of cloves and allspice. Let boil two hours. Add a tablespoonful of rich cream. Serve cold.
This is gefilte fish in its older, literal form — fish actually stuffed, rather than the poached balls sold in jars. Two details in the original need attention before anything else: the boiling time and the identity of the second fish.
- Two hours is the ruin of itThick stuffed slices of freshwater fish are done in 25 to 40 minutes at a bare simmer, once the forcemeat is set and opaque through. Two hours at a boil will collapse the slices, strip the skin and leave the flesh cottony; long times of this kind are common in period recipes, and it is not always clear how hard a "boil" was intended.
- "Red fish"In American cookbooks of this period the term can mean red drum (a Gulf saltwater fish) as well as other species, and it is not clear which is meant here; neither is an obvious partner to trout. For the dish as intended, use carp, pike, whitefish or a mix — the classic gefilte fish trio — and keep the trout if you like it.
- Cut and skinTwo-inch slices means crosswise steaks through the backbone. Loosening the skin from one face of each steak so it can be peeled back, filled and replaced is the whole trick; a thin flexible knife and cold fish make it possible. Tie each slice with kitchen string if the skin will not stay put.
- Cracker-crumbsMatzo meal is the traditional binder and behaves the same way. Fine unsalted cracker crumbs or dry breadcrumbs work; count on roughly a cup for four pounds of fish.
- One egg is thinFor this quantity of stuffing, one egg gives a loose paste. Two eggs, and a little of the fish trimmed off and chopped into the onion mixture, will hold together far better under poaching.
- The broth is the pointPoach in just enough water to cover, with the onion, carrot, parsley and spices. Strain the liquid, reduce it if it tastes weak, and chill it — a good carp or pike stock sets to a soft jelly on its own, which is what "serve cold" is driving at.
- The tablespoon of creamCream is unusual in this dish. Jewish dietary practice separates fish from meat rather than from dairy, though a minority custom avoids fish with milk as well. The plainer objection is that cream cannot be part of a jelled stock. Leave it out, or stir it into a separate portion of strained broth as a sauce.
- SpicingA pinch of cloves and allspice with plenty of pepper places this in the Lithuanian-style peppery camp rather than the Polish sweet one. Add sugar only if you want the other tradition.
- YieldFour pounds of fish on the bone serves six to eight as a first course. It is better on the second day, cold, with the jelly and sharp horseradish.
Gef ten rendered Gef f is a name often given as German-Yiddish for "filled fish," and this version shows why the name once made literal sense: the flesh was seasoned and bound with crumbs and egg, then returned to the skin so the fish came to table looking whole. The economy is the point — a small amount of expensive fish stretched with crumbs and onion, poached in a broth that sets to jelly and so keeps and can be eaten cold on the Sabbath, when no cooking is done. Freshwater carp and pike, cheap and plentiful in Central and Eastern Europe, were the usual fish; the trout and "red fish" here are an American substitution. The stuffed form gradually gave way to the simpler poached balls and, later, the jarred product, which is why most cooks now meet the name without the filling that gave it.