Nanna's Gefilte Fish - An Excerpt from Hungry Heart

This essay is excerpted from Hungry Heart, and was first printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

You cook it all day, with your fan running and your AC turned up. Afterward, you dot your surroundings with little bowls of vinegar “to get rid of the stink.”

And when you fly to one of your daughters’ houses for one of the Jewish holidays, you and whichever grandchild comes to pick you up wait by the baggage carousel for a Playmate cooler—the plastic kind that college guys keep their beer in—triple-wrapped in newspaper and garbage bags, enrobed in masking tape and labeled, simply, fish.

Gefilte fish, which means, literally, filled fish, is a special occasions dish mostly because it’s incredibly time-consuming to make, requiring pots, pans, fresh fish, a fish grinder, and an especially high tolerance for the smell of simmering fish heads.

The dish often is a combination of whitefish, pike, pickerel, and carp (if you like carp, which my Nanna does not), ground and mixed with eggs, onions, and matzo meal, formed into patties and boiled for hours in a vat of fish broth.

The finished product looks like hamburger in black and white, if you’re feeling charitable; like brains if you aren’t. It’s an acquired taste, considered a delicacy by adults who grew up eating it, and a fate worse than death by children who grew up eating Happy Meals.

My Nanna’s is out of this world, and it’s much in demand, so she’ll make it for special dinners as well as big Jewish holidays, turning out enough to donate to friends, coconspirators, and her down-the-hall neighbor, who can’t help but smell the boiling fish.

Recently, I wandered into the gefilte-fish-making process by accident. I’m in Florida on business, a concept which my Nanna doesn’t quite get. “So if they’re paying you to be here . . . does that mean you still get paid for a week’s work?”

“Yes,” I say.

My Nanna—Faye Frumin—is 81, but she looks just the way she’s looked all my life, a small, trim woman with her face set in the same determined lines that you can see in her wedding photographs. She lives in a South Florida compound called Century Village East, home to about 15,000 senior citizens, spending their golden years sitting in the sunshine, sustained by the occasional, all-too-rare visit from a child or grandchild. Or great-grandchild, of which my Nanna has none. This lack will be a major topic of conversation in the hours ahead.

When I arrive, she’s sitting by the window and looks startled when I tap, which is typical, because a long time ago my family decided that I was a complete incompetent in terms of real-world dealings, which means that everyone’s delighted whenever I manage to turn up anywhere at all.

“You’re here!” she says, and hugs me.

Today is Wednesday. On Sunday, she’s giving a dinner party for a few friends, plus “that nice young couple that used to live next door.” (Careful questioning reveals that the members of this nice young couple are both in their 60s.) Tomorrow, she’s making fish.

Shopping is our major activity: mostly, I think, because my mother, her daughter Fran, hated it so much, and Nanna feels the need to compensate.

When my mother’s four children were young and defenseless, she was known to dash up and down the aisles of the local Marshalls, a shopping cart in front of her and a determined look on her face, grabbing indiscriminate fistfuls of children’s clothing off the clearance rack and muttering, “This’ll fit someone.”

Nanna, on the other hand, likes to shop. And she’s much more careful. She considers fit and style. She follows trends.

In the dressing room she clucks her tongue at my sunburn, pokes my stomach. “Stop eating so much!” she says. Then she redeems herself by ferreting out a terrific pair of black suede loafers from the size 10 rack, and paying for everything.

Back at the Village, Nanna is wiped. We call my mother. I report on my activities in Miami. I got a sunburn, I tell her. And a blister from Rollerblading.

We have dinner at a big, noisy steak house. “You can order the chicken without skin here,” Nanna says helpfully. So I do.

She is delighted when I pick up the check: “I like going out with you!” she says.

Back home, we get ready to sleep. Tomorrow is a busy day, and Nanna’s got the menu and schedule, on the phone pad, to prove it:

(1) Soups: Borscht or Bean?
(2) Gefilte fish, kugel, pickles, beets, olives, red peppers, bread, and rolls.
(3) Coffee and Cake.

* Thursday: Pick up fish; pick up bread.
* Thursday: Make fish.
* Saturday: Make kugel and soup.
* Sunday: Finish kugel, set table, make iced tea and coffee.

On Thursday at 7:30 a.m., I wake to the smell of chopped onions.

“Get up,” says Nanna. “It’s time to get the fish.”

But first we have breakfast with Nanna’s friend Helen from the thrift shop. Helen is beautifully attired, perfectly accessorized, carefully made up, and completely deaf. She communicates with my Nanna by talking directly into her face.

Me, she communicates with by grabbing both of my hands and getting psychic emanations. “I see success!” she proclaims. “Do you see any babies?” asks Nanna.

Then it’s off to Pops’, where Nanna buys her fish. Rows and rows of recently deceased bluefish and monkfish and catfish stare up at us in regimented, iced lines.

Nanna asks after the whitefish, debates the merits of buying a frozen pike, which is brought out from the freezer for her inspection. Eventually, she decides on just the fresh whitefish.

“No carp?” I ask.

“I don’t like carp,” says Nanna, tapping the glass case disparagingly, right above where a big red blank-eyed carp reposes. “Such an ugly fish, I couldn’t stand to look at it.”

What happens next?

If you are my Nanna, you go to Dora’s and grind the fish in her Mixmaster. You add the onions and matzo meal. You also add eggs and whip it all into a frenzy. This will bind the fish.

Then go home to make your broth. Combine your fish heads, bones, and skin with water, onions, and carrots, sliced horizontally, so that when you serve, each piece of fish gets a pretty carrot on the plate.

How much water? How many onions? Nanna shrugs. “Enough,” she says.

Simmer the broth until everything’s soft. Add water until the pot’s full. Bring everything to a boil. Form your ground fish/egg/ onion/meal mixture into little balls (“or big ones, if that’s what you like”). Boil the fish balls for “two, two and a half hours.” Fish them out. Then strain your broth, retaining the carrots, and put everything in the refrigerator and chill, and “it turns out delicious.”

Air the house out for three days.

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