September 24, 2014 — Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is a day when everything tastes like dessert. In symbolic hope of a sweet year to come, the table is positively sticky — honey marinades, honey cakes, raisin-studded challah bread. And, depending on where your family is from, sweet gefilte fish.
Gefilte fish, those oft-reviled patties packed in jelled broth, can be a hard sell even in its standard savory form. And with a big dose of sugar stirred in? It can be hard to swallow. But for Jews with roots in Poland, gefilte fish was always sweet. Always.
"I like to think of the gefilte fish sweetness variation as the Jewish version of the great European olive oil/butter divide," jokes Jeffrey Yoskowitz, co-founder of the Gefilteria, which makes small batch gefilte fish out of Brooklyn. On one side of the divide: sugared sweet gefilte. On the other — the side whose gefilte became standard in American Jewish cuisine — the fish is savory, seasoned with salt and lots of pepper.
Both Yoskowitz and his co-founder, Liz Alpern, have family roots in Poland and grew up with the sweet version. But in a nod to prevailing tastes (and to not mask good-quality fish), they settled on a bit of a hedge: a bit sweeter than the standard, but dialed back from the versions of their childhoods.
"Of everything we considered when making our gefilte fish, sweetness was among the top considerations. It's so contentious," Yoskowitz acknowledges. Which raises the question — why?
It turns out this difference in gefilte fish comes down to the explosion of a new industry in early 19th-century Poland: sugar beets.
Imported sugar was a highly valued commodity in Europe — "the oil of that time," jokes culinary historian Gil Marks, author of The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. And in the face of this pricy import, the first sugar beet factory opened at the turn of the 19th century, in what is now southern Poland. And from there, the industry (with heavy Jewish involvement) took off. And sugar made its way into everything.
Read the full story at Jefferson Public Radio