The world's most sensational single-serving hand pie and potato pocket? All about the knish
SalonThe first time I had a knish was a formidable moment. Alison Ladman writes in Our Coast Magazine that knishes "started as peasant food, later became a 19th century street cart convenience food and now are a staple of Jewish delis." This Chris Crowley Serious Eats story actually calls the knish "New York's miss congeniality," summing up the ethos of the knish beautifully: "a bomb of starchy fillings like nutty kasha groats or mashed potato with caramelized onions, wrapped in a thin sheet of dough and baked, the knish is claimed by Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians, and came to New York on the backs of Jewish immigrants." As Laura Silver, author of "Knish; In Search of the Jewish Soul Food," tells Serious Eats, "the knish was a conduit to a better life and a different social status." Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, "knisheries" began opening up throughout the Lower East Side, during the time when tons of people migrated to NYC in the hopes of a better life, oftentimes living in horribly overcrowded and unsafe tenement buildings and seeking out the "American dream," sometimes via food.
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