Yes, I Do Miss Whitefish

I read an article on whitefish and became nostalgic.

So I excerpted this as the next best thing:-

...the wonderful whitefish-salad recipe from the new “Mile End Cookbook,”...

“Dear neighbors, friends, curious onlookers, deliphiles, crazed nostalgists, sympathetic vegetarians, self-hating Jews, Canadiens fans, lumberjacks, children of the Mulroney era, and lovers of all things ‘Montrealaise’ ” read the sign outside the small, permanently packed restaurant announcing its opening. Members of such groups are likely to enjoy this cookbook...writes David Sax, historian and author of such books as “Save the Deli” and “A Jewish Deli, Born Again,” in his essay for the book. “The Mile End phenomenon is the work of two people, still in their twenties, with absolutely zero professional cooking experience.”

...Noah and Rae met at a Shabbat dinner in a dorm room at McGill, where he was “making a very convincing argument against the existence of God.” He was from the Montreal suburbs, she from New York....The couple moved to Brooklyn in 2007...they opened a restaurant named for the Montreal neighborhood where Noah’s grandparents grew up.

“Many delis became nostalgia acts, just churning out the greatest hits, like the Steve Miller Band of matzo ball soup and corned beef sandwiches,” Sax writes. “Reduced to survival mode, the Jewish delicatessen had stopped evolving.” Not so with Mile End, whose mission of “redefining Jewish comfort food from hash to hamantaschen” you can now champion from the comfort of your own kitchen.

As with the whitefish salad: there’s no mayo involved, so it’s a light, lemony concoction, with pickled asparagus and lots of lovely crunchy things (celery, red onion, and scallions) to keep you digging in. I served it to guests on thick slabs of homemade challah—with every spoonful, sternly warning everyone to watch out for almost definitely non-lethal pin bones—with quick cucumber pickles, an impressive-seeming snack of thinly sliced cucumbers coated in a salt and spice mix just minutes before serving.

Let's see, the last time I had NY deli whitefish was at the brunch following my cousin's son's wedding in New York a year ago.

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