Guilt-Free Gefilte Fish
"If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it." That’s what my cousin Jay said at Passover this spring. A stylish ophthalmologist with a graying beard, he sliced, then speared a bit of gefilte fish with his fork and lifted it to his mouth.
The gefilte fish -- or rather the family recipe for it -- was what we were talking about. For those of you unfamiliar with this bit of cultural cuisine, gefilte fish is perhaps the most emblematic of all Eastern European Jewish delicacies. It’s a combination of white fishes, mixed and chopped raw with eggs, matzah meal, carrots, and onions. It’s then shaped into ovals and poached in a stock made with onions and fish bones.
Jay took another bite. The recipe, probably scores of generations in the making (historians tell us gefilte fish dates from the Middle Ages) was handed down to me, inculcated in me really, by my late mother and grandmother over long years in the family kitchen. From the time I was old enough to cut carrots with a blunt knife, I took part in this holiday ritual. Now, with my mother and grandmother both gone, the recipe is my inheritance. It connects me and my family to my mother and grandmother on the holidays when we miss them most. On Rosh Hashanah and Passover, their gefilte fish, at least, remains.
Now I was thinking about trading it all in. "Don’t go looking for trouble," Jay said, an eyebrow arched, as he appraised another bite.
Trouble was what I was hoping to avoid, actually. Trouble in the global sense. Our world’s fish populations are in such bad shape that a recent United Nations report predicts that our oceans will be depleted in 30 or 40 years if we don’t dramatically change our fishing practices. As the parent of two small children -- children who will be in their 30s or 40s when those dire predictions could come true -- I don’t want to help push our aquatic ecosystems over the edge. For years, I’ve carried around the wallet-sized recommendations of environmental organizations telling which fish is a "best choice," which is a "good alternative," and which to avoid. (Now, I can rely on a fabulous iPhone app.)
Yet I never find the two types of fish that my family recipe requires -- whitefish and yellow pike -- on these ratings. Ordinarily, with omissions like these, I err on the side of caution. I’m the one you see at the sushi bar eating a peanut roll and some deep-friend tofu instead of order a fish that might be endangered. Truth is, just because a fish isn’t on the "avoid" list doesn’t mean its stock is in good shape. But since gefilte fish in some way defines who I am, defines who I want to be -- the daughter of my mother, the granddaughter of my grandmother -- I’d taken that absence as a justification to continue following the age-old recipe. In a changing world, tradition has anchored me.
But so, too, has Judaism, which commands me -- as it commands Jews everywhere --to repair the world. So this year at Passover, I decided to heed that larger call and alerted my family that I was investigating. Maybe there was recipe just as good that could meet the criteria that our current fish crisis demands. I called some of the nation’s top seafood sustainability experts at places like the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Blue Ocean Institute for help, but it wasn’t easy. "What’s the exact fish you mean?" several sources wanted to know. "Lake whitefish? Round whitefish?" Turns out, the relationship between fish and their common names is a complex one. In some cases, several species are grouped under one handle. Scrod, for instance, can be cod, haddock, even pollock sometimes. In other cases, one type goes by many monikers. "Do you know the Latin species name?"
I did not.
"And where and how was it caught?"
Another mystery. I frequent Joon’s Westside Fish Market, a homey Manhattan storefront where Joon grinds the fish for me right in the store, saving hours of work. The laminated identification cards by each selection of fish report only "wild" or "farmed." Given that "wild" often fetches a higher price these days -- at least in certain New York neighborhoods -- it’s hard to know how much credence to give to these reports. Never, in my many years as a fish shopper, have I seen a sign that points to the methods by which fish have been caught, though these methods can make the difference between a fish deemed "sustainable" and one to avoid.
After several months of inquiries, I had little to go on. Finally, a kind and raspy-voiced employee of Acme Smoked Fish in Brooklyn, one of the nation’s largest smoked-whitefish purveyors, confirmed that lake whitefish was the variety I had been consuming. But when a staffer at the Blue Ocean Institute tried to walk me through the sustainability and health data connected to the species on Fishbase.org, a huge, web-based resource on all things piscine, it was so complex that I nearly gave up.
Then Tim Fitzgerald, who runs the sustainable seafood program at the Environmental Defense Fund, answered my plaintive e-mail with a phone call that was heartening and deflating in quick succession. Whitefish and yellow pike, he said, are plentiful in the Great Lakes, their point of origin. A mechiah! A great relief!
Lest I rest too easy, though, Fitzgerald cautioned: Great Lakes fish "have had a problem with PCB contamination for quite some time." PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, are industrial chemicals used in the manufacture of things like electric transformers and capacitors that poured from factories into the Great Lakes until Congress banned them in 1979. Because they cause cancer in laboratory animals, they’re considered probable human carcinogens. Lake whitefish contained PCBs, he said. So did walleye, another name for yellow pike.
To make matters worse, unlike mercury, which a lot of us consume in fish, and which leaves the human body a few months after consumption, PCBs “take five to 15 years to break down in your body,” he said.
That kind of settled it. Poisoning my relatives for the yontiff, for the holiday, seemed like a particularly bad idea, tradition or no.
Fitzgerald proffered a list of fish for a new recipe that were available to buy in the Northeast and relatively free of neurotoxins and cancer promoters. They were wild Alaskan salmon, farmed Arctic char, Black sea bass, haddock, sablefish (also known as black cod), farmed striped bass (the wild has lots of PCBs, too), and tilapia farmed in the United States or Latin America. Steer clear of the Asian stuff, he said.
It wasn’t a long list, but I held to it. My next task was finding a chef to help with the recipe. (I’m a competent home cook, but no Julia Child.) So I called Joan Nathan, the doyenne of Jewish cookbook authors and host of PBS’ Jewish Cooking in America with Joan Nathan. "It used to be, Jewish cooks made gefilte fish from any fish they could get their hands on," she said. "I think you can sling any of these fish together." In fact, Nathan told me, every year before Passover she hosts a gefilte-fish-a-thon at her home. Six friends make six different recipes and they all taste good. That was freeing in a way — you can make it from anything! — but didn’t assuage the concern about my family’s high standards.
As the cooking date approached, with Joan Nathan’s advice fresh in my mind, I thought about my grandmother’s admonition that you need to mix a fatty fish with a lean one for optimal results. So on a USDA nutrient data website, I checked the fat content of the various fishes Fitzgerald recommended and decided just to wing it. I mixed the Arctic char with farmed striped bass, in the 2 pounds-to-1 pound ratio my grandmother enjoined several decades back.
Joan Nathan offered another pointer: sauté the onions a day in advance. She was publishing a new book on the cuisine of the Jews of France, she said, and the French sautéed. Have they ever been wrong in matters of cuisine? I tried it. And just to step the sustainability up a notch, I cut the cooking time down to two hours, from two and a half. (Less methane burned means less of its byproduct CO2 in the atmosphere.)
Then, after a long afternoon at a hot stove, I assembled a panel of experts for a blind taste test. Really. My cousin Jay and his wife Joann couldn’t make it. But my Uncle Ronny, a veteran of 70-plus years of family gatherings, and his wife, Nancy, were on hand. So was Prof. David Kraemer, author of the fascinating Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages. The table was similarly graced by Jane Ziegelman, the incoming food curator at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum; her strudel is known to be divine.
Because Kraemer and Ziegelman are foodies, they asked questions like "Should we try it with horseradish and without?" (Either way was fine, actually.) My uncle, for his part, dove in.
Here’s the startling thing: Everyone but my uncle liked the new recipe better. (Another startling and sad fact: the sautéed onions made no difference whatsoever.) "Fish # 1" -- the unnamed family recipe -- "was a more familiar combination," Kraemer said. "But I have to say, I like them both!" The new one had more of a fish flavor, he said, in a good way.
My aunt, who’s in charge of the food at our seder, cast the deciding vote for the new recipe (over my uncle’s objections): "Bring the new one. I think you should bring it and not say a word."
First, though, I need to buy a new wooden chopping bowl. The old one, my great-grandmother’s originally, I think, has developed a crack. Given the rapid rate of deforestation the world over -- 13 million hectares annually, a land mass the size of Nicaragua -- I’ll ask for one from a well-managed forest.