This is a Jewish fish story. Or more accurately a Jewish fishworm story.

My mother, like her mother, was an expert Jewish cook, their specialties famous in our extended family. Their secret: taste as you go. Season slowly until the perfect flavor comes through.

It’s a safe technique with latkes or kreplach but not always with gefilte fish, a ground concoction of freshwater fish, spices, eggs, salt and matzo meal.

My mother never became sick from tasting raw fish, but, by chance, gefilte fish turned out to be a formidable problem for my medical partner’s wife, Rita.

Rita was meticulous in keeping a kosher house and enjoyed making the special Jewish dishes, including gefilte fish. An unusually energetic young woman, she was able to work in the garden, clean the house, cook and support her husband’s surgical practice without effort. But she had not been feeling well for months: abdominal symptoms of cramps, distention and occasional diarrhea, associated with increasing weakness, shortness of breath, lethargy and fatigue.