Erev Pesach

Erev Pesach...I'm totally unprepared, completely chametzdich. But this yontif is always special because in this time my Father assumed a quiet dignity that his family tried to take from him for marrying my mother. My Father became a "JEW" again, renewed himself through cooking.

We would walk together down the block from our West End Avenue apartment to the fish mongers. I cannot recall the man's name but his shop was 3 steps up. We walked in and my father always dealt with the owner who wore a black rubber apron and towered over a long wooden plank covered with blood and fish muck. We were always greeted warmly, his mallet raised high and a big smile. He knew why we had come.   My father selected his whitefish and pike after looking over the glistening fish laid out over crisp cold ice.

Father made his order...20 lbs of chopped fish, leave the bones and heads in a separate bag and grind onions into the fish. Since it was a big job including a number of fish, it would be delivered later. When the knock came at our back door where deliveries were made, father placed the bag into the freezer. A heavy plastic bag filled with sweet smelling fish and onions, it took up most of the freezer. Freezer compartments in the 1950s and 60s were usually small boxes inside the fridgerator with a small plastic door.

While the fish began to chill to near freezing, father prepared 2 very large stock pots with water, the fish bones and onion skins and slice onions. They took along time to reach boiling so I watched him putter around the kitchen absorbed in his work in total silence.
He brought out a wood bowl that was only used for making gefilte fish. It seemed like the largest bowl in the world. He had a hand chopper which he would use after removing the plastic bag of fish from the freezer. And he began his magic....

The fish was emptied into the bowl, he chopped at the icy crystallized fish, adding one egg after another until at least were worked into the fish. He added sugar, a lot of salt and even more black pepper and then washed his hands. I would bring a small bowl of cold water so he could begin his work. He used a serving spoon to scoop large quenelle shaped balls into his wet hands and pat them from palm to palm before slipping them into the simmering water scented by leaves of onion skins. He stuffed the heads last and laid them gently on top. We had so much fish cooking the entire 7th floor smell of the richness of the broth. He would tell me, never use carp, they eat all the garbage in the ocean. He also never used fillers like matzah meal. He didn't have to because he learned from his mother that freezing the fish and cooking it in slushy state kept it snowy white, flecked with pepper and pristinely sweet.

Sometimes I would go into the frigerator and just grab a fist full of fish, a single ball would fill my hand, and nibble at it slowly.
The broth from cooking was jellied from all the bones and heads. The eyeballs would turn opaque and bounce around at the bottom of the pots my mother was expected to clean and she always came in afterwards and complained how her stove was awash with sticky fish stock, onion skins that splashed over and that fish smell that brought flies buzzing at the kitchen screen.

He would hand me $20 and tell me "give this to your mother for cleaning up." And then he sat, curiously content and silent in the late afternoon sun streaming onto the blue pile rug in the living room. His pesach was complete. We would likely have guests of my mother sister who also married a Jewish man, a milliner that worked in my father's building in the Garment District. He would try to explain to everyone at the table all the items on the seder plate, but all these were secondary, mainly because in the privacy of his thoughts for a brief few hours my father had gone home, cooking with people I would never meet or know.