Welcome to another episode of Eating the Past. I’m Laura Gelfand, and on today’s show we’ll continue exploring the
remarkably diverse world of dumplings. The kinds of dumplings we’ll focus on today are found in nearly every culture.
Known by many monikers, fish cakes, including the crab cakes familiar to most of our listeners, are another clever way
to stretch expensive ingredients and make more with less.
In fact, the oldest surviving cookbook includes a recipe for fishcakes. “The art of cooking” by Marcus Gavius Apicius dates
from around 20 C.E. and instructs readers to cook anchovies or another small fish, chop them finely, season, then add
eggs, oil, and broth to make a paste that is then shaped and steamed.
Apicius writes that, “when done, sprinkle with pepper and carry into the dining room. Nobody will be able to tell what he is
enjoying.” It’s hard to know if that’s a good thing or not.
Quenelles are a more sophisticated version of fish dumplings. The word quenelle first appears in 1750 and is thought to derive
from the German knödel, meaning noodle or dumpling. Although you can find quenelles throughout France, the most famous
versions are served in Lyons and Nantua. There, the quenelle de brochet, which are made from pike, are served with crayfish
sauce.
King Louis XI is said to have tasted quenelle while traveling through the region, as did Louis XV. That began as a simple dish of
farm ingredients (milk, eggs, flour, and fat), was ennobled with the addition of fish, and an author from Lyon, a city famous for
its food, wrote that quenelles offered “the greatest satisfaction that can be given to the palate of an honest man.”
I feel like I need to offer a word of caution here: quenelle can easily be mispronounced as canelle (which means cinammon),
and unless you want a French waiter to mock you and your pronunciation, as happened to me, you should be careful when
ordering quenelles.
And now for gefilte fish, a fish dumpling that is, in my humble opinion, a lot less appealing than quenelle. Although gefilte
fish are now associated with Jewish cuisine, the dumplings began as a Lenten dish for German Catholics. By the medieval
period they were adopted by German Jews and incorporated into sabbath and holiday meals.
In the earliest versions of the dish, the flesh of freshwater fish was removed, finely chopped, seasoned, forced through a
sieve and stuffed back into the intact fishskin to be cooked and served.
Eventually the fishskin was omitted and the force meat was formed into patties or balls. It was only in the 20th century that
clever butchers discovered that gefilte fish could be preserved in a quivering gelatinous fluid and sold in glass jars. I have
been told that homemade gefilte fish is a lot of work, but excellent. I’ll leave it to more intrepid listeners to find this out for
themselves.
