Although gefilte fish plays a central role in Jewish culinary tradition, many American Jews have grown up unfamiliar with the homemade recipe. Traditionally made with de-boned carp, ground and mixed with matzoh meal or breadcrumbs, onions, eggs and seasoning, then poached in a broth made from the fish bones, gefilte fish was once an intricate and labor-intensive dish that offered Jewish home cooks an opportunity to display their virtuosity. Beginning in the 1950s, it was marketed to American Jewish homemakers as a convenient jarred product, and today many who know the dish are familiar with it only as a packaged food. Asya Vaisman Shulman writes in Pakn Treger, or “Book Peddler,” the magazine of the Yiddish Book Center, that “access to variety of prepared foods and a growing disengagement from tradition caused a rapid decline in gefilte fish preparation in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.”
Barbara Cohen’s children’s book The Carp in the Bathtub, first published in 1972, tells a story centered on old-fashioned gefilte fish preparation that was already a cultural memory for many of its young American-Jewish readers. Leah and Harry, the main characters in Cohen’s book, know gefilte fish only as a homemade dish. In fact, it is precisely because they have seen every step in the preparation process that they harbor a secret: they have never tasted a single bite of their mother’s famously excellent version. After days of playing with the fish their mother brings home alive, and feeding it bits of bread and lettuce, the children can’t bear its fate: “Could you eat a friend?” As a child, I could relate to this jarring question—I remember covering my ears so that I would not hear the thud of the fishmonger’s club when my grandmother bought carp for her gefilte fish. Even so, unlike Harry and Leah, it never occurred to me to not eat the product of my grandmother’s labor. My grandmother’s gefilte fish was delicious.
Despite the traditional dish’s starring role in Jewish celebratory meals, the shift away from traditional recipes is not surprising considering the laborious process of making gefilte fish. Gefilte, in Yiddish, means stuffed, though the actual step of re-filling the carefully preserved head and body of the fish with the gefilte mixture is a flourish not all home cooks include. Harry and Leah’s mother is a master of the dish, but even she has dispensed with this challenging step. As Leah exclaims, “At least Harry and I were spared that!” Her mother, too, may have been grateful to skip that painstaking work.
Xenophobic attitudes toward “smelly” foods of immigrant cultures (see, for example, “Garlic and Social Class”) may be another reason why jarred gefilte fish took over the American-Jewish table throughout the twentieth century—and then, ironically, the strange-looking jarred product itself became a source of shame in itself. Rebecca Flint Marx describes her own childhood alienation from the authentic Eastern European recipe in “Learning to Love Gefilte Fish” (2016). She knew only the industrialized version of the dish, and remembers watching her mother eat “nugget after terrible nugget, and feel[ing] embarrassed that Jews ate such ugly, mysterious food.” She also reflects on her own reading of The Carp in the Bathtub as an “anti-gefilte fish cautionary tale.” Gefilte fish here is a source not of beloved cultural memory, but of deep-seated immigrant shame.
One place to trace the story of the jarred gefilte takeover is in culinary pamphlets of the mid-twentieth century. A 1960 pamphlet of Passover menus produced by Philadelphia Gas Works encourages “the housewife” to seek out traditional Jewish foods that are newly available in convenient cans and jars. The Mansichewitz Company’s “8-Day Menu Planner and Recipe Guide,” produced for Passover in 1971, includes a checklist “for easy shopping at your local grocer” featuring no fewer than nine jarred variations on gefilte fish. Perhaps even Leah and Harry’s own mother would have welcomed the respite these products offered.
Despite easing the home cook’s labor, mass-produced gefilte fish has shortcomings in flavor and visual appeal. In fact, a jar of prepared food on a festive holiday table is hard to swallow for many reasons. When a host sets a table with silver and linen, as many Jewish families continue to do for Shabbat and for holidays, they are unlikely to place a recognizably industrial food product at its center. Instead, family recipes and community cookbooks trace a new genre of recipes focused on doctoring up a jar of gefilte fish to make it more appealing. One such example lies within the recipes of Rose Maybush Flax. Rose’s handwritten recipe cards include a recipe dated 1985 that calls for many of the same ingredients as Mama’s gefilte fish—carrots, celery, eggs, matzoh meal. However, the key ingredient is not a live carp but a 24 oz. jar of gefilte fish.
Similar recipes are scattered in synagogue community cookbooks, produced by Jewish women’s groups from across the country (see The Recipe Project’s Summer 2024 issue Cooking Up Community for more on this genre). These cookbooks trace the survival of gefilte fish recipes across the United States. Many of them also document traditional techniques for preparing gefilte fish (though none call for a live carp).
Detailed instructions for the preparation of gefilte fish also hide in surprising contexts, including a 1988 episode of the radio show Laugh Lines, broadcast by the feminist Boston Women’s Community Radio. Here, a grandmother and granddaughter acknowledge the labor that is inherent in the recipe while sharing their commitment to passing on the technique. Finding this conversation in a secular feminist context is striking—these women reject the marketed “ease” of the industrial product in favor of the traditional recipe, accepting its historical difficulties in order to access its culinary delights.
Tamar Gonen Brown is a librarian who currently serves as the head of education and outreach at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, located at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, MA. She earned her doctorate in English and American language and literature from Harvard University, her master’s degree in library and information science from Simmons University, and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago, and has sampled gefilte fish on or around all three of these campuses. Her professional interests include teaching and learning with primary sources, culinary history, women and gender studies, and the history of the novel. If you are interested in learning more about some of the culinary collections at the Schlesinger Library that helped inspire this piece, this research guide will help you get started.