So did Helen’s church friends I loved to think of her fellow-Baptists gorging on gefilte fish at their church socials. Helen refined her filter fish each time she made it, and my friends and neighbors got a taste for it, too.

But her powers of improvisation were formidable, and she made magnificent gefilte fish (she called it “filter fish”), which, I had to acknowledge, was as good as my mother’s.

The fishmongers were happy to give us carp, whitefish, and pike, but I had no idea how Helen, African-American, a good, churchgoing Christian, would manage with making such a Jewish delicacy. When she arrived each Thursday morning, we would set out for the Bronx to do some shopping together, our first stop being a fish shop on Lydig Avenue run by two Sicilian brothers who were as like as twins. Helen improvised everything, nothing was by the book, and, learning my tastes, she decided to try her hand at gefilte fish. I thought I would never taste anything like my mother’s gefilte fish again, but in my forties I found a housekeeper, Helen Jones, with a veritable genius for cooking. As the gefilte fish cooled, a jelly of an extraordinarily delicate sort coalesced, and, as a child, I had a passion for the fish balls and their rich jelly, along with the obligatory khreyn (Yiddish for horseradish). My mother would fashion the mixture into balls about two inches in diameter-two to three pounds of fish would allow a dozen or more substantial fish balls-and then poach these gently with a few slices of carrot.

(Litvak gefilte fish, I was told, used more pepper, which is how she made it-my father was a Litvak, born in Lithuania.) She would then mix the ground fish with raw eggs, matzo meal, and pepper and sugar. (The fishmonger delivered the fish alive, swimming in a pail of water.) The fish had to be skinned, boned, and fed into a grinder-we had a massive metal grinder attached to the kitchen table, and my mother would sometimes let me turn the handle. Our gefilte fish was basically carp, to which pike, whitefish, and sometimes perch or mullet would be added. When I was growing up, my mother would take off from her surgical duties early on Friday afternoon and devote her time, before the coming of Shabbat, to preparing gefilte fish and other Sabbath dishes. Gefilte fish is not an everyday dish it is to be eaten mainly on the Jewish Sabbath in Orthodox households, when cooking is not allowed.

Everything in its place oliver sacks