“[The knish] was a conduit to a better life and a different social status,” Silver says. Knishes first started showing up on Lower East Side around 1910, when Yonah Schimmel reportedly opened on Houston Street. In 1916, the New York Times reported from the front lines of the Lower East Side’s knish scene. In an early instance of Times reporting on the food, an article titled “Rivington St. Sees War” covered a long lost place called Max Green’s, which it deemed “the originator of the great knish” and the first to sell it. Knisheries opened up wherever Jews moved, from Shatzkin’s in Coney Island to Adelman’s in Midwood to Knish Nosh in Forest Hills. The knish, when it’s done right, is just as delicious as the bagel. There’s a filling of onions cooked to golden caramel in chicken fat, then painted onto a belly-hugging potato canvas. That carby mass is then wrapped in thin, pliant dough and blistered in the oven. It’s great with deli mustard.
