When I was in eighth grade I asked the rabbi of my father’s shul, the Hebrew Institute of White Plains, “What type of fish is a gefilte fish?”

Rabbi Murry Grauer explained to me that it was a combination of fishes…and the following week, my question became his sermon. I had grown up with jarred gefilte fish, in a translucent jelly. The fish was dense and cold, and in my parent’s house we dipped it in pink “chrain.”

(So much here to unpack)

When I moved to the Upper West Side in my late 20s, I encountered “The Loaf.”

Gefilte fish, shaped like a hockey puck, served warm, with salsa topping. It looked sophisticated and elegant; unlike the jarred stuff my parents & grandparents ate.

I felt cultured and nuevo.

(Not your mother’s gefilte fish)

This was a light, spongy disc. June & Rene Slotkin used to cut a triangle out of the disc and position the triangle at the other end of the plate.

(It looked like a fish, with the triangle as its tail)

The late 90s on the Upper West Side was a time of honey mustard chicken and broccoli salad with craisins and cashews. We drank Bartenura, white wine from a blue bottle, and we served gefilte fish, fresh out of the oven.

(So, you reinvented a traditional Jewish food?)

Gefilte fish isn’t even a Jewish food.

(How dare you? It’s as Jewish as matzah!)

Actually, it isn’t. The earliest historical reference to gefuelten hechden (stuffed pikes) comes from Daz Buoch von Guoter Spise (The Book of Good Food), a Middle High German cookbook dating to circa 1350 CE. right around the end of the Black Death and right about the time that the Roman Holy Emperor, Louis IV instituted an additional tax on the Jews, just the Jews.

(So, if it a non-Jewish dish, why do we eat it?)

First, it was a convenient dish to make. You mixed the pike, or whitefish, or carp with matzah meal. Add an egg or two for emulsification. Once you have a paste or dough like mixture, you stuff it back into the skin of the fish and cook it. Once cooked, you can store it as ready to eat.

Secondly, the Hebrew name for fish (dag) is numerically equal to seven, the day of the week for Shabbos.

Third, there was a belief that a fisheye could ward off the “evil eye.” Which makes sense coming off the Black Plague.

(But no one believes in that stuff, right?)

My grandmother used to end her sentences with “Kynah hara.” (Blee eye-in hara)

Remember, they were part of the “Lost Generation.” The turn of the 20th century was a world without antibiotics or vaccines. People randomly got sick and died.

(But how did we get here, I mean with the fish?)

When I asked my grandmother, “Who catered my father’s bar mitzvah?” I was taking my life in my hands.

“Catered? I made gefilte fish, pickled fish and a couple kugels!”

My grandfather chuckled and added, “The week of your father’s bar mitzvah I came home and expected to take a bath, but there were three carp swimming in the bathtub!” My father grew up in Brooklyn where if you wanted gefilte fish, you needed a bathtub and a baseball bat to knock the fish out with when you were ready to start the prep. If you wanted chicken for Shabbos dinner you got to tell the shochet which bird to shecht. When my father was five, he accompanied my grandmother to the butcher. He picked out the chicken for Shabbos. Then he was chased down the street when the “schected” chicken jumped off the table and ran after him. My grandmother was trained to cook and bake by her mother, who left Europe in the 1880s. Like many Jews, she came here from a small town with big recipes. When she got here she found that she could afford to make anything they wanted, but they stuck to their parents’ recipes.

I’m 56 years old, but if I close my eyes, I can still see my grandmother in my parent’s kitchen waving a wooden spoon at my 10-year-old self as she prepped the Passover seder meal. I can still taste the hand grated kugel, I can still smell the hand grated “chrain,” I can still feel her hug. And, I can still hear her laugh at the idea of catering a bar mitzvah.

David Roher is a USAT certified triathlon and marathon coach. He is a multi-Ironman finisher and veteran special education teacher. He is on Instagram @David Roher140.6. He can be reached at [email protected].