The Wrong Gospel of the Warm Gefilte
It’s still Passover — even when you’re not keeping it, it’s eight full days of guilt — so here’s a story about one of wildest days I’ve ever had at work, which is, conveniently, also about Passover.
So the first thing you have to understand is that when this happened, I was working at a grocery store in one of the west side Cleveland suburbs. There’s actually a huge Jewish community in Cleveland that dates back to the early 1800s — a couple of Jewish guys moved to town and then sent letters home like “Cleveland is a fine and affordable place to live,” which is how most everyone ends up here — but those Jewish Clevelanders largely don’t live on the west side. On the east side, where I grew up, you’re always within 15 minutes of a temple, but on the west side you’re just in Ohio, where it’s totally normal to encounter folks who’ve never even met a Jew before. (There is certainly a separate conversation to be had about the incredibly complicated dynamics of the east side and the west side in Cleveland, which are about a lot more than just Judaism, and I’m fully prepared to have that discussion as soon as I’m sure I totally understand everything involved. I’ve lived here all my life, and am hopeful I’ll be ready to revisit this complex and intricate topic in roughly 40 years — but like, honestly? No promises.)
I live on the west side for one simple reason: I don’t want to run into people I went to high school with, friends of my parents, my childhood rabbi, or any of my former teachers while I’m in line at a store holding nothing but Triscuits and wine. I’m not looking to lock eyes with my old pediatrician while selecting toilet paper at CVS; it’s not dignified. And because many people who live on one side of Cleveland are inexplicably stymied by the half-hour drive to the other side, living where I do effectively solves this problem for me. It just comes at the cost of having a couple of really weird conversations about Judaism a year — conversations that are sometimes antisemitic, but usually just uninformed and odd.
I wasn’t the only Jewish person working at the grocery store where this tale takes place — after about a year of employment, I discovered at least one more — but I was the only Jewish person in the prepared foods department, which boasted a team of about fifty. This was a strange position to be in, because sometimes the food we prepared was, in fact, Jewish. The store was part of a national chain, and Cleveland’s higher-than-average Jewish population meant we were allocated a certain number of specialty dishes during the Jewish holidays. These dishes did not really move at our store for the reasons I laid out above, but they did so well at our sister stores on the east side that the company kept sending them along anyway, numbers be damned.
The prepared Jewish food sold at this store was not good, but that made sense, because most of the prepared food sold at this store was not good. That they consistently got away with charging $8.99/pound for wedges of roasted sweet potato, or $11.99/pound for cold, unseasoned grilled chicken, astounds me to this day. And certainly they misrepresented the food of such a staggering number of different cultures that it was a topic of regular discussion amongst the (largely powerless, and often active members of those cultures) staff.
Anyway, back to the story: I was working my second job the day the Passover food was scheduled to arrive, so I wasn’t at the store. When I showed up for my shift the next afternoon, I knew immediately that something was not right: there were cold latkes — a food traditionally served at Hannukah — in the deli case. Worse, they weren’t kosher for Passover. When I asked the nearest manager about it, he shrugged, said we hadn’t received everything that we were supposed to, and that the next guy up the management chain had pulled out some unsold frozen latkes from December to fill in the gaps.
Then — before I could even begin to explain that it wasn’t great to arbitrarily replace the foods of one Jewish holiday with the foods of another, unrelated Jewish holiday, let alone versions of those foods that couldn’t actually be eaten on said holiday — he said, “Hey, you’re Jewish, right? Can you tell me what the zimmies are? Customers keep asking about them, and I don’t know what to say.”
I stared at him for a moment. Then I followed his gaze to the large dish of tzimmes on display, sighed, and explained. Once we’d gone over pronunciation and content, he said, “Huh. Well, that doesn’t seem so bad. I have to admit, no offense or anything, but the hot fish balls kinda freaked me out.”
“Hot… fish balls?” I asked, my eyebrows climbing. I couldn’t think of a single Jewish food that might fit that description, though I had a grim guess.
My fears were confirmed when he said, “You know, the gefelt stuff or whatever it’s called. We had them on the hot bar yesterday, but they REALLY didn’t move, so the boss deep-fried the rest of ‘em and put them on the wall.”
It took me a moment to process this. If you aren’t familiar, gefilte fish — that is “gefelt or whatever it’s called” by its correct name — are basically fish cakes. To make them, you take ground fish (usually whitefish in my experience, though it can vary), and seasoning and sometimes onions and sometimes matzo meal, you mix it all together, you form either into balls or large logs for slicing, and then you poach it until it’s cooked. It is served cold, or sometimes at room temperature; it is not, and I cannot stress this enough, a hot dish. And while apparently it is sometimes fried in British Jewish communities, in that specific circumstance the poaching step is skipped, so the fish cooks just once in the hot oil. It certainly is NOT poached until fully cooked, flash frozen, shipped cross-country, thawed, and then deep fried into a craggy, lumpen brown brick of overcooked despair that’s much heavier than it looks like it should be, which is what happened that day at the grocery store.
The deep-fried gefilte fish — and, perhaps even more foul, the tray of gefilte fish slowly collapsing over the steam tray on the hot bar — haunts me to this day. Sometimes when I’m driving around the west side I’ll accidentally catch the eye of someone in an oncoming car and think: did you see it? The gefilte mistake? Were you there to witness the terrible crimes? And if you did see it, what are you up to now? Are you out there living your life just believing that’s what gefilte fish is? Have you shared the story of that fish what they ruined with others? Are you, right now, spreading the wrong gospel of the warm gefilte?
There’s no way to know, of course. And ultimately it doesn’t really matter — the concept of Jewish food is a wide and ever-expanding umbrella, one that encompasses many dishes and traditions, and it will not be brought down by a single incorrectly prepared shipment of gefilte fish. Also, it’s not as though the longstanding antisemitic conspiracies about what we eat can get much worse! But I do think this story neatly demonstrates how easily things can go off the rails, in general, when a person or organization attempts to speak for or represent a culture it has no knowledge of. It’s not just that it risks being offensive, or making an ass of the person/organization it question — it also risks disseminating deeply wrong information. Somewhere in this town is someone who thinks of gefilte fish as a hot pan of slowly dissolving fish lumps, and there is nothing I can do to find and disabuse them of this notion. And while this saddens me, I take comfort in checking even more thoroughly than I once did for misinformation in my own life. It’s a worthy goal, I think, to try and avoid spreading any version of the wrong gospel of the warm gefilte.
Anyway, if you’ve never seen a grocery store display eight packages deep with unsellable deep fried gefilte fish, captured in the moments before a frantic Jewish employee hustled them off the shelves…
…now you have. Chag sameach!