We are used to eating herring either in pure form, with boiled potatoes, or in the form of a salad “Herring under a fur coat”. It's time to diversify your menu a bit, because you can cook a delicious appetizer, which is famous for Jewish cuisine - forshmak, from an ordinary herring. You can even say that the foreshak among the Jews is almost on the same level with matzo, they love him so much. And there is a reason, the Jews know a lot about food. In addition, Jewish cuisine is one of the few where practically incompatible ingredients can be perfectly combined in one dish, and special cooking rules (kashrut) give free rein to culinary inventiveness. Cooking mincemeat is absolutely simple business. There are many recipes for this dish, and in just 25-30 minutes you can get quite a lot of delicious snacks that you can spread on bread or eat with the same boiled potatoes.
For example, here is such a Jewish forshmak (classic recipe): 3-4 herring to peel and bone, remove the heads, tails and fins, so that one flesh remains, which is soaked for one or two hours in one glass of milk. After that, twist the fillet in a meat grinder. Peel one large, green, sweet and sour apple, remove the middle and cut very finely. Do the same with two small onions and a small bunch of green onions. In a quarter cup of milk, soak 3-4 slices of loaf (without a hump), squeeze it and, together with onion and apple, scroll in a meat grinder. Combine this mass with herring and twist again. After that add three finely chopped egg whites (boiled) to the resulting minced meat, season with one tablespoon of mustard and two tablespoons of apple or wine vinegar. The yolks remaining from three eggs, grind with two teaspoons of sugar and a quarter cup of sunflower oil. You can add a little ground black pepper. Attach the yolks to the total mass and mix thoroughly again. Forshmak is Jewish-ready, now it can be nicely laid out on a herring or in any other convenient dish. Sprinkle with boiled and chopped egg yolk or finely chopped green onion.
Forshmak in Hebrew can be prepared in another way: to remove one kilogram of herring from the head, tail, bones and skin and cut into pieces; 200 grams of white bread cut into cubes and dried in the oven. Three hard boiled eggs and finely chop. From two green sour apples, cut the skin, remove the core from them and also finely chop. Do the same with two small onions. Combine all the ingredients except the eggs, mix and double-scroll with a meat grinder, pepper a little, pour over the juice squeezed from half a lemon. After that, add the eggs, mix everything thoroughly, wrap in plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. Two hours later, the foreshmak is fully Jewish in Hebrew.
And here’s another version of the mincemeat, but instead of herring they put here ... mushrooms. To prepare it, you will need 50 g of dried mushrooms and 250 g of canned, as well as 400 g of potatoes, 100 g of carrots, 150 g of tomatoes, 100 g of onion, 50 g of parsley, 3-4 chicken eggs, 100 grams of sour cream and butter, 50 g of breadcrumbs, 50 g of cheese. We prepare this so-called hot mincemeat with mushrooms as follows: rinse, boil and finely chop the dried mushrooms. Do not pour out the water after boiling the mushrooms, it will come in handy for the sauce. Salted mushrooms are also finely chopped. Boil carrots and potatoes, simmer the tomatoes in oil, fry the onions until it becomes golden. When all the vegetables are ready, rub them through a strainer and season with salt and pepper. Next, take raw eggs and separate the yolks, which are ground with sour cream and butter. Beat the whites separately until a thick foam is obtained. We combine the vegetable puree with mushrooms, a mixture of yolks and sour cream and proteins, mix. We completely grease a deep frying pan or a baking dish inside with oil, sprinkle it with plenty of breadcrumbs and put our mushroom mass into it, sprinkle it well with shredded cheese and put it in the oven. While the mincemeat is baked, we prepare the sauce for it: pour a little flour into the pan, add a little water from the cooked mushrooms, put sour cream, add and boil for 5-6 minutes, stirring constantly. When the foreshak is covered with a golden crust, it can be removed from the oven. Serve the sauce separately.