There isn’t much about gefilte fish that appeals to the senses, and there was little Ellen Leidenthal could do about that Sunday afternoon as she cooked up a batch in her kitchen in Rockland.

Once cooked, gefilte fish cakes look like lumpy gray rocks. The fish smell can be overpowering. The raw fish mixture feels like something cold and slimy.

“It looks like something someone ate before,” Leidenthal said as she cut up raw fish fillets while keeping an eye on a pot of fish stock on her stove. “It looks like brains. Why Jewish people eat this stuff, I don’t know.”

Perhaps the worst of gefilte fish is the jellied broth in which the fish cakes are jarred and sold at stores. The gelatinous mess is unpleasant looking, smelling and tasting. Yet gefilte fish is a staple at the festive Jewish table and almost a required food for the holiday of Passover, which starts April 19 and ends April 27.

Leidenthal, who is doing most of the cooking for an April 20 Passover Seder at Rockland-based congregation Adas Yoshuron, will serve homemade gefilte fish that she cooked and froze Sunday afternoon.

The word gefilte means filled in Yiddish. The dish used to be served with the fish mixture stuffed inside a fish, cooked, and then sliced. Nowadays, Jewish people are much more likely to buy gefilte fish cakes in a jar, jelly and all.

A California native who moved to Maine about a year ago, Leidenthal was determined to make gefilte fish by hand, without the unappetizing jellied broth. The process, it turned out, was easier than the experienced cook thought it would be.

Leidenthal spent two years cooking at the Yokoji Zen Mountain Center near Idyllwild, Calif., and now bakes for Rock City Coffee Roasters in Rockland.

“[Feeding large groups] isn’t a big deal, no. The gefilte fish is kind of a big deal,” said Leidenthal, who was raised in a relatively nonreligious Jewish household and has wanted to spend a year refocusing on her roots.

“I think a lot of people who are Jewish find a point in their lives that they want to reconnect,” she added. “One of the reasons I moved to Rockland was there was a synagogue. In Los Angeles you just don’t get involved with things. You’re too busy driving everywhere.”

There’s no agreement on why gefilte fish is so closely associated with Passover, said Adas Yoshuron Rabbi Amita Jarmon, who stopped by Leidenthal’s house Sunday. Fish is a standard first course for Jews during Sabbath or other festive meals, Jarmon added.

It fits the dietary restrictions for Passover, during which no foods with leavening agents may be consumed. The gefilte fish mixture is just fish, egg, salt and pepper, onion and matzo meal, which is made of ground matzo and is used in place of bread crumbs.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with the absence of chametz [leavened items] and the eating of it. I don’t eat [gefilte fish] at any other time of the year,” Jarmon said. “But why Passover, I don’t know.”

There are dozens of recipes for gefilte fish, as Leidenthal discovered while doing research on the Web. She picked one recipe for the fish stock and another for the gefilte fish cakes, tweaking both. The gefilte fish recipe she picked called for sugar and almond extract in the fish mixture, but she opted to leave those out.

The gelatinous broth, Leidenthal said, is the result of cooling fish stock made from the bones and parts of a fatty fish. She used flounder parts, along with standard stock ingredients such as onions, carrots, bay leaf, parsley and some ginger. The stock cooked on the stove for an hour and the gefilte fish cakes would cook in the stock until they were done.

With the stock cooking away, Leidenthal turned her attention to the fish cakes themselves.

To start, Leidenthal cut 9 pounds of cod and haddock into large chunks and processed it in batches to achieve a ground texture. Once the fish was ground, Leidenthal mixed in minced onion, egg, a few tablespoons of matzo meal, salt and pepper. She stirred the mixture with a spoon first and then worked it with her hands.

Here’s where Leidenthal’s cooking experience came in handy. Unsatisfied with the overly chunky mixture, she put part of it back into the food processor for more grinding. She then tried to form a cake into the standard egg shape but didn’t like the looseness of the mix, adding a little more matzo meal with better results. The cakes held together, and Leidenthal formed about 80 from the mushy mixture.

After straining the herbs, vegetables and fish bones out of the stock, Leidenthal started to cook the cakes. She placed a few cakes in one of two pots of stock, waited for the cakes to rise to the top and then cooked them until they felt firm to the touch, about 17 minutes.

Leidenthal sliced one cooked cake for some guests to sample.

“Mmmm,” Jarmon said, her eyes widening. “We always have good food, but I think it’s going to be extra special this year. It’s extra work. Why not just get gefilte fish in the jar? But Ellen’s going to make us a beautiful meal.”

The cakes will be served as an appetizer with the traditional carrot garnish during the Seder meal. Leidenthal is also planning a butternut squash and apple soup, herb-roasted chicken with vegetables. Synagogue members will bring other dishes and desserts.

Leidenthal doesn’t plan to use the stock once it cools and gels, but she wasn’t ready to part with all it. She planned to keep a little in her refrigerator.

“We’ll see what happens to it,” she said.

jbloch@bangordailynews.net

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