Wanted: Excellent gefilte fish recipe

I’m on the hunt for a good, old school and heimish gefilte fish recipe. I know, I know. These days, the kosher culinary world is all about the cutting-edge sophisticated kosher interpretations of popular contemporary foods.

For me, though, the charm of holiday foods, and especially Pesach foods, is in the sentiment of nostalgic, traditional foods of childhood and Pesachs past.

At this point, I should probably let you know that I don’t really like gefilte fish.

I mean, I don’t care for the current popular version of gefilte fish. There was a time when I loved gefilte fish. When I was little, my mother poached homemade deboned gefilte fish dumplings that were delicious. Then, one day it all stopped. We moved from Israel, the “Old Country,” to the new, more modern one, America, where you didn’t have to spend hours making food from scratch.

As my family was transitioning between Israel and settling into Denver, we had moved into my grandmother Miriam Goldberg’s home for nine months. Well, what do you know. That jarred Manischewitz gefilte fish swimming in sticky translucent jelly — she thought it was delicious and had the house supplied with it in abundance!

In the sixth grade, moving countries, cultures, languages — it wasn’t easy. But adjusting from homemade simmered gefilte dumplings to that jarred stuff? That may have just been the hardest part of the whole move.

Like tall and round looking shtreimels, the hot Yerushalmi Kugel of Jerusalem —charred crisp black on the outside and creamy caramel-y noodles on the inside — this was the stuff of my Jerusalem Shabbat kiddushes. Contrast this with Denver in the 1980s; yes, there were those weeks of sponsored kiddushes with the most scrumptious version of cholent out there, but many Shabbatot were basic: Tam Tam crackers, raw onion-y herring, egg kichel, and petite meatball size gefilte fish balls.