Mimi Sheraton in The Daily Beast: Fasting to Feast: A Yom Kippur Story

Laid out buffet style, as there were always guests, the post-Yom Kippur break fast-supper included many kinds of preserved fish: smoked salmon, whitefish, my beloved silky sable, and the most miraculously sharply briny, pungent pickled herring I have ever eaten, which I prepare when feeling super ambitious. My mother would put it up right after Rosh Hashanah, choosing a barrel salt herring that she soaked and then cut in cross slices leaving skin and bones in place to preserve flavor and juices. She always insisted in having the miltz or spleen of the fish to be mashed into the finished sauce for creaminess, sour cream to be added at the table. With lots of half-crunchy slices of onion and the exotic aromatic overtones of cloves, bay leaf, hot chilies, peppercorns, coriander and mustard seeds that make up a pickling spice mix, the result was a gastronomic epiphany that got the New Year off to a fragrantly delicious start.