Knish

A knish /ˈknɪʃ/ or knysh is an Eastern European snack food consisting of a filling covered with dough that is either baked, grilled, or deep fried.

Knishes can be purchased from street vendors in urban areas with a large Jewish population, sometimes at a hot dog stand or from a butcher shop. It was made popular in North America by Eastern European immigrants from the Pale of Settlement (mainly from present-day Belarus, Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine).

In the most East European traditional versions, the filling is made entirely of mashed potato, ground meat, sauerkraut, onions, kasha (buckwheat groats), or cheese. Other varieties of fillings include sweet potatoes, black beans, fruit, broccoli, tofu, or spinach.

Many culinary traditions feature similar baked, grilled, or fried dough-covered snacks, including the Cornish pasty, the Scottish Bridie, the Jamaican patty, the Spanish and Latin American empanada, the Middle Eastern fatayer, the Portuguese rissol, the Italian calzone, the Indian samosa, the Texan klobasnek, the Czech kolache, the Polish pierogi, the Russian pirogi or pirozhki, and the Ukrainian pyrohy or pyrizhky.

Knishes may be round, rectangular, or square. They may be entirely covered in dough or some of the filling may peek out of the top. Sizes range from those that can be eaten in a single bite hors d'oeuvre to sandwich-sized.

History

Eastern European immigrants who arrived sometime around 1900 brought knishes to North America. Knish (קניש) is a Yiddish word that was derived from the Ukrainian knysh (книш) and Polish knysz. The first knish bakery in America was founded in New York in 1910." Generally recognized as a food made popular in New York by immigrants in the early 1900s, the United States underwent a knish renaissance in the 2000s driven by knish specialty establishments such as the Knish Shop in Baltimore, Maryland, Buffalo and Bergen in Washington, DC, or My Mother's Knish, in Westlake Village, California.

See also

• Jewish cuisine
• Turnover
• Yonah Shimmel's Knish Bakery