From The Chicago Reader's Bleader column:
Gefilte fish is an endangered species this Passover
- A platter of homemade gefilte fish.
TuesdayMonday night marks the beginning of Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the exodus from Egypt with a superlong meal interspersed with responsive readings and songs and the consumption of large quantities of Manischewitz wine. The Passover menu consists of a number of symbolic foods that represent various stages of the epic journey from slavery to freedom, but in most households, the most sacred of all is gefilte fish.
Gefilte fish are actually fish balls, usually made from a mixture of ground whitefish and pike or carp, traditionally eaten cold with a garnish of horseradish. If this sounds disgusting, it's because it is, particularly if your fish comes with little globules of fish jelly clinging to it, but it's the sort of disgusting thing that is considered a delicacy, particularly if your family is descended from eastern European Jews who fled the czar, the Cossacks, and the pogroms, often with little more than the gefilte fish recipe. These recipes are sacred, held close and carefully passed from generation to generation. (My own family's comes from my maternal great-grandmother, who only relinquished it mere months before she died. Every Passover, someone marvels at what a close call we had.) They cannot be altered.
But this year, thanks to the cold, cold winter, Lake Superior is still frozen, and there's a severe shortage of whitefish. And Passover is less than a week away.
Reader senior theater critic Tony Adler attempted to place his order yesterday morning. (His ancestral recipe calls for three parts whitefish to one part
carppike.) He called Burhop's in Wilmette, from which he orders his fish every year. His request, he reports, was met with a long, hard burst of laughter.
"We should have 200 pounds," explains Burhop's manager Ademola Olurotimi. "Ten or 20 pounds is what we do have. We've been promised a few tomorrow, but that's not even guaranteed."Apparently there is a seasonal pattern* to the trade:
Even if you can get your hands on some whitefish, you'll be paying for it: prices have spiked to $18 a pound, up from the usual $12.
Most of Burhop's fish comes from Union Fisheries, a supplier on the northwest side that deals with the fishermen directly. In most years, early April, the Passover season, is their busiest time, but this year they can't even get their boats out. This is catastrophic for them, Olurotimi says, because they depend on the Passover rush to make the year's profit....MORE
Bnei Brak rabbi calls for gefilte fish boycott*More accurately it is a quasi-periodicity as the Holiday has arrived as early as the second-to-last week of March and as late as the last week of April due to the calendar calculations to set the lunar date.
Rabbi Shmuel Eliezer Stern issues unusual halachic ruling in bid to prevent stores from charging exaggerated prices for carp fish ahead of Passover....
I'm told that last week's sale of Manischewitz by Phil Falcone's hedge fund to Bain Capital is a non-story, nothing to see here.
