Where Are The Knishes From Long Ago?

from the nyobserver, February 2, 2003
TO this day, whenever my mother sits down on a beach, she makes the same joke. "Where's the knish man?" she asks, knowing full well that there isn't a beach left in America that serves piping-hot mashed potatoes to sunbathers.
Annie Oakley laughed when she heard this. "I remember them too," she said. "My family and I used to sit on the beach at Coney Island, near the parachute jump - that was the Polish section - and there would be these men walking around with brown shopping bags, yelling: 'Hot knishes! Ice cold soda!' ''
I myself wouldn't expect to find the knish man in Coney Island. I know things have changed considerably since my mother was strapping on water wings. I did, however, expect to find knishes on the streets of Manhattan, and when I didn't, I got worried.
It started innocently enough. One day, in the mood for a knish, I approached a hot-dog cart and placed my order. The vendor told me he was out of them, and wouldn't ke potato, kasha, cabbage or liver. Wrapped in dough and baked, the knish was the perfect city food.
"Its appeal is really pretty simple,'' said Jack Koff, owner of Mrs. Stool's Knishes in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, one of the city's oldest knisheries. "They are good, they are filling, and they are cheap.'' Schoolchildren and sweatshop workers alike could grab a hot knish from one of the Lower East Side's ubiquitous pushcart vendors and eat them on their way to school or work.
"My mother would take me shopping on the Lower East Side in the winter," Mimi Himes, the food writer, remembered, "and I remember buying knishes because they warmed your hands as much as your body."
Over time, meat fillings like liver fell by the wayside, while potato knishes became standard issue.
By the early 20th century, knisheries like Mrs. Stool's and Yonnah Stimmel's on the Lower East Side did a brisk trade selling knishes out of a storefront instead of a cart. Around this time, Elia Gabbay started Gabbilah's Knishes, which revolutionized the industry by mechanizing the knish-making process (places like Mrs. Stool's and onnah Stimmel's still make them by hand) and frying them instead of baking them.
Frying the knish made it more durable, so it could be stacked and sold out of hot-dog carts and, yes, by knish men on the beach. These knishes, which were square instead of round, were the most common knish on the streets of New York.
Sometime in 1996 the knish became a target in the eyes of the city's Health Department, although the effect of this attention wouldn't be felt for a few years. It was that year that cooked potato was added to the department's list of potentially hazardous foods. Such foods must be kept at 140 degrees, lest bacteria grow and endanger the health of the consumer.
How this ruling affects knish sales has to do with the different kinds of food carts. In Health Department parlance, there are "processing" carts, where food is cooked to order, and "nonprocessing" carts, where items can only be heated.
The difference is usually obvious: the large, Nimitz-class carts that have griddles, grills and a rolling log of lamb meat are processing; those that just have hot dogs in warm water and some pretzels are nonprocessing. Only processing carts generate enough heat to cook knishes at the legal temperature, and processing carts account for only 14 percent of the city's roughly 3,100 carts.
By the time the Giuliani administration started cracking down on street vendors in 1998, selling knishes in an unlicensed cart could result in a $500 fine, or confiscation of the cart. Fines and restrictions remain the same under Mayor Bloomberg.
For many vendors, the risk is not worth it. A highly informal survey of street vendors, who tend to be a remarkably laconic bunch, determined that a cart moves a maximum of five knishes a day. Most sell none at all.
"I have some knishes," one vendor said, "but I rarely sell them. Maybe in the winter I'll sell a few, but even then. " He shrugged.
But you can't blame just the Health Department. If knishes were in high demand, there probably would have been an outcry. Somehow raw chicken meat sometimes sits on a griddle in the open air all day, but precooked potato is no longer allowed. The difference, perhaps, is that a lot of people order the chicken-and-rice platter, and if it were taken away, people would probably get angry. Nobody is storming City Hall over knishes, and part of that may be the fault of the knish itself.
"I'm glad to see them go," said Jim Luff, author of "The Electric Food Guide to New York" and the creator of Cowhound.com, an encyclopedic and raucous message board whose focus is food spots in New York. "I equate it with the eradication of the West Nile virus. The knishes that were sold on the street were lousy, soggy little things that gave knishes a bad name. If you want an idea of how awful they are, consider this: They make potatoes taste bad."
Others take a similarly jaundiced view. "You can trace the decline of the street knish to the absolute demise of the locally produced, fresh, delicious knish," said Chaym Yonkel. "Many people's first knish, including my own, was a square, frozen thing that, to be honest, didn't taste very good."
Even the best knishes are not light eating; and in the last two decades, New Yorkers, among others, have been more interesting in light eating than in a mound of mashed potato that has been baked or fried in dough.
In truth, most of the knishes I ate were pretty awful, although with enough mustard, almost anything will taste O.K. But there was something unifying about a knish, that crossed lines ethnic and generational.
IT was the quintessential 19th-century New York food," said Seymour Koontz.
I'd take it a step further. It was the quintessential New York food, right up there with the hot dog and the slice of pizza. But where those attained a national appeal, the knish remained defiantly local. There was something heartening, even in a David Dunkins-gorgeous-mosaic way, about seeing a group of Korean kids eating something my Russian-Jewish grandmother would enjoy. With the knish now in retreat, the world of street food loses an elder statesman. Gabbila’s Knishes
Follow Up. You can still get Gabbila's knishes at Katz's and Fairways

Created by Elia Gab ay in 1921, Gabbila’s Knishes—the familiar fried, potato-packed pockets—were Coney Island’s hottest portable snack during the resort’s Roaring ’20s heyday. Gabbay got his start selling the knishes from the back of his Model T Ford, later purchasing a factory in Williamsburg staffed almost entirely by family members. “From 10:30 till 4 o’clock in the morning it was nonstop,” says Alan Steinberg, a longtime associate and childhood friend of the family. “The lines were long, stretched down the block, people just coming over and buying by the dozens.” Though the company, helmed by Elia’s grandson Elliott Gabbay, is now based on Long Island, the “Coney Island squares” are still made using the same recipe and 86-year-old machines that pumped out the originals. You can find the knishes at Jewish delis like Katz’s (205 E Houston St at Ludlow St, 212-254-2246