Before halal chicken and rice, or egg-and-cheese sandwiches, the street carts of New York sold knishes — many of them of the square, fried variety, a hefty, gut-warming pillow of fried dough filled with seasoned mashed potato.

Like the hot dog, which hit the streets of New York just before the knish’s debut in the late 1800s, the knish has not only endured, but also lived to spawn dozens of variants. But knish eaters have found themselves stymied since a small fire broke out at the end of September at Gabila’s Knishes, the Long Island factory that produces most, if not all, of the city’s fried knishes, tearing a small but keenly felt hole in the city’s economic fabric: a shortage of knishes.

The factory apologetically announced that the knishes would have to wait. The delis of New York, many of which make their own baked knishes but rely on Gabila’s for fried ones, apologetically asked their customers to accept a smaller, rounder, baked-not-fried substitute.

“There are people who are literally in a craze over the fact that they can’t get them,” said Stacey Ziskin Gabay, one of the current owners of Gabila’s, which is based in Copiague, N.Y. “You would think it was someone missing a limb — God forbid!”