May 6-12, 2004

food

Fish Stickler

FROZEN ASSETS: Edward Piszek's career as a merchant of frozen fish began when he sold crabs from a Kensington bar.

Edward Piszek (1916-2004) made fish less frightening.

by Carolyn Wyman

It has been business as usual at Philadelphia’s finer seafood restaurants the past few weeks. If the staffs noted at all the recent passing of Mrs. Paul’s fish-stick king Edward J. Piszek, it was probably more on the order of a joking "good riddance." If so, the ignorance was theirs -- because if not for Ed Piszek, there probably wouldn’t be anyone to eat their stuffed shrimp or ahi tuna.

Piszek, 87, died March 27 at Emlen House in Fort Washington -- a mansion where George Washington actually did once sleep -- and a far cry from the scrappy Nicetown neighborhood where Piszek was raised by immigrant Polish parents. At his memorial service at Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul on April 3, Piszek was lauded for his deep faith (in both God and the Phillies), business acumen that created hundreds of jobs for Philadelphians and financial largess that introduced Little League baseball to, and eradicated tuberculosis from, his parents' native land.

All wonderful things, but to food writers like me, none is as important as Piszek's impact on American eating habits. When Piszek started Mrs. Paul's Kitchens in 1946, America was basically a meat-and-potatoes nation. Piszek's frozen sticks were the first product to get us hooked on fish in a big way.

Piszek didn't invent fish sticks, but he made them wildly popular with sales techniques that included, in the early days, teaming up with his wife, Olga (known as Oddie), on sales calls: In his 2001 autobiography, Some Good in the World (University Press of Colorado), Piszek recalled that he would be in the store making his pitch to the store manager when Oddie, posing as Mrs. Average Housewife, would approach them and begin extolling the virtues of Mrs. Paul's products.

Piszek also got a big assist from the Roman Catholic Church's Friday and Lenten meat-eating prohibitions. By the time the Friday ban was lifted in 1966, fish sticks were blessed to be in millions of Catholic homes and on thousands of school lunch menus.

As the son of a Germantown grocer, Piszek naturally gravitated toward jobs in the food industry, at first as a salesman for Camden's Campbell's Soup Co., and later running the food concession at a now-defunct bar at Third and Cambria in Kensington. Mrs. Paul's first product was actually a line of frozen deviled crabs left over from a slow night at that bar. Crabs were popular with Philadelphia Italians, but Piszek realized as his bar concession grew into a Manayunk-based frozen food business that the broader market of average Americans preferred fish that was less obviously fishy.

Piszek was as much educator as businessman. He did not frighten his "students" or fans with dishes including big eyes, strong smells and troublesome bones, but instead fed them fish that was so predictable looking and safe, so mildly flavored and deliciously fried, that it was almost impossible not to like (especially when, as so often was the case, it was drowned in tartar sauce or ketchup).

Many fish-stick eaters later would graduate to non-fried (but still mild) sole or cod in "natural," uneven shapes and eventually to stronger-tasting shrimp, salmon and bluefish. This country has now progressed to the point where some Americans not of Asian descent actually enjoy eating fish in its raw state -- sushi!

Ironically, in schooling Americans about fish, Piszek was simultaneously laying the groundwork for his business' destruction. Today, fish fillets and steaks outsell training-wheel products like Mrs. Paul's fish sticks four to one. Piszek was smart enough to see that shark fin in the distance and, in 1982, sold Mrs. Paul's to his old employer, Campbell's, while still reeling in his personal multimillion-dollar catch.

Piszek lived out his remaining days as a Polish-American philanthropist, a role for which he had long trained. His donation of 250 trailers of fish cakes to Polish workers protesting against their communist government in 1980 began his longtime friendship with Lech Walesa. In the 1970s he successfully lobbied Congress to turn the Pine Street home of Polish-born Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko into a national historic site. Early in that decade, he spent half a million dollars on an ad campaign aimed at combating the scourge of Polish jokes from American popular culture by publicizing the accomplishments of such other important Poles as Chopin, Joseph Conrad and Copernicus.

Surely fish-stick king Edward Piszek deserves a place on that list.