Chopped herring and kichel

Does anyone remember chopped herring and kichel? I'd like to give it a try. I seem to remember the kichel being broken up and added to the chopped herring mixture, but I'm seeing accounts of the chopped herring being spread atop the kichel.

Thanks,

In our family, chopped herring was always served on cocktail rye slices, although my dad probably ate it on rye crisp. This year I tried it with rye melba, but it just wasn't right.

BTW, I just looked at a bunch of recipes online. None matched what my mom used to make. She used the jar of herring in wine sauce, not the salted fillets, and rye bread not white bread. It used to take her most of a day to make it, peeling all the apples, cutting the crust off the rye, and repeatedly chopping everything with a hand crank grinder.

These days I just put it all, including peels and crust, into a food processor and run until the consistency is right. Takes all of 5 minutes.

I think that I have seen Kichel at Leonards Bakery in Northbrook. I would call first.

Leonard's Bakery
2776 Dundee Rd
Northbrook, IL 60062
(847) 564-4977

Evil Ronnie wrote:Does anyone remember chopped herring and kichel? I'd like to give it a try. I seem to remember the kichel being broken up and added to the chopped herring mixture, but I'm seeing accounts of the chopped herring being spread atop the kichel.

Thanks,

That's an interesting combo. I'll have to give that a try one of these days. In our house, kichel was usually served as part of the dessert course with coffee.

I saw Kichel and Diet Kichel today at Garden Fresh Market in Northbrook. It was located in the kosher section and was baked at North Shore on Touhy. It looked like cookies, as Stevez mentioned above.

stevez wrote:In our house, kichel was usually served as part of the dessert course with coffee.

Our house, too. But unless ya ask.... So, I've done a little sleuthing and, as they say, who knew? Most of my Jewish cookbooks don't mention the kichel. In fact, none of them do. However, I found several books that mention using bread or bread crumbs. One is an old Jewish cookbook published in 1918 and uses it both as binder and pan "liner" in the style you suggested, layering the herring on top (also offering crackers as a substitute). The other noteworthy one is a Polish book published in 1988 as a collection of historical Jewish recipes. Its recipe for chopped herring calls for white bread and suggests seasoning with sugar to taste. (The third is a Hadassah cookbook from 1972 which includes some challah, apples and sugar as well.) So: there's more to be discovered and I'll see what I can find.

PS Let me know if you'd like the 1918 recipe.

The only kichel that I remember weren't sweet. They were neutral tasting and seemed to me to be quite airy...almost like pate a choux. Of course we were Jews from southeastern Virginia. What the heck did we know from kichel? We knew more about oyster crackers or biscuits.

Anyway, I knew another guy who was a cook at our local orthodox synagogue, and he's the one who told me about adding the crushed up kichel to the chopped herring spread.

Sounds to me like it might work out fine. Light and airy, slightly sweet crumbs combined with chopped pickled herring and hard boiled egg. What's not to like?

Kichel is certainly not sweet (pate a choux is a good comparison), but I always remember it as a coffee or tea accompaniment.

To me, it sounds like a nice combination, especially if the herring is of the sweeter style. Personally, I like the idea of spreading it atop the kichel to be more appealing than breaking it up and mixing it in.

Please let us know how your experimentation turns out.

Best,
Michael

eatchicago wrote:Kichel is certainly not sweet (pate a choux is a good comparison), but I always remember it as a coffee or tea accompaniment.

Well, just goes to show you. My experience has been that it is nothing if not sweet. Not overly, not cloyingly, but sweet nonetheless. Joan Nathan's Jewish Cooking in America asserts (rightly or wrongly) that the word kichel itself means cookie, although she offers both sweet and savory recipes.

Remembering kichel from many Jewish bakeries growing up (I think Leonards still sells them along with Zayde cookies a firmer version), I decided to make them for Rosh Hashanah this year since they are parave and my daughter wanted cookies. They were something different than mandelbrot. I used the recipe in Joan Nathans cookbook. They came out good not overly sweet something to have with tea or coffee in the afternoon. Not really a luxury dessert style cookie.

I don't know about using them with chopped herring. We ate and still do a lot of pickled herring but never chopped herring.
Paulette

The kichel of my memory were not sweet at all...and, as I recall, hard as a rock. Usually, they were dipped in the coffee before eating (but not always, especially if you were not of coffee drinking age). I've also seen a varient that had a layer of sugar on top, ala sugar cookies. I'm pretty sure Kauffman's sells kichel on a year round basis.

stevez wrote:The kichel of my memory were not sweet at all...and, as I recall, hard as a rock. Usually, they were dipped in the coffee before eating (but not always, especially if you were not of coffee drinking age). I've also seen a varient that had a layer of sugar on top, ala sugar cookies. I'm pretty sure Kauffman's sells kichel on a year round basis.

NYBB on Touhy also usually carries it.

Kichel is definitely available at Tel Aviv Kosher bakery on Devon - but that is an odd combination herring salad and kichel one I have never heard of - true sweet and savory pickled fish salad on top of a sugar coated cookie -

Kichel in my memory is dry and tasteless--I haven't eaten it in years. I think of it as one of those boring things on the Bar Mitzvah buffet tables of my youth. However, I do see something similar to what Evil Ronnie remembers in a Jewish English cookbook of the 1970s by Evelyn Rose. She mentions that "crumbled sweet biscuits (crackers)" can be added to chopped herring in place of the fine matzo meal she gives in her recipe in order "to soak up the extra juice." The recipe includes salt herring, apple, onion, a bit of sugar, vinegar, and hard-boiled eggs. So kichel crumbs plus herring was not unique to southeastern Virginia. I can supply the recipe if anyone is thinking of making their own. Warning: the first instruction reads: "The day before, cut the heads off the herrings, slit the belly and remove the entrails."