»Rubin Caslow

Brooklyn-based maker of excellent whitefish salad Rubin Caslow died. The Associated Press sez:

Rubin Caslow, the chairman of the largest producer and distributor of smoked fish in the country, has died. He was 86.

Caslow, whose Acme Smoked Fish Corp. in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, sells certified kosher smoked salmon, herring, whitefish and pickled lox, died Sunday at his home in Roslyn, on Long Island, his granddaughter Emily Caslow, said Wednesday.

The business had modest beginning, with Caslow's grandfather, Harry Brownstein, selling lox and chubs to small stores from a horse-drawn wagon in the early 1900s. Brownstein later opened a smokehouse, at a time when there were hundreds of them in Brooklyn.

Today, Acme sells more than 7 million pounds of smoked fish around the country to such food specialty emporiums as Zabar's, Balducci's, Barney Greengrass and Russ & Daughters, among others.

It operates out of an 80,000-square-foot facility in Greenpoint that includes tanks for brining and a huge forced-air smoker.

In 2000, the privately held family-run company added the Blue Hill Bay brand, a preservative-free, dry-cured line of nova, gravlax, hot-smoked salmon, cold-smoked yellowfin tuna, brook trout, and jarred herring fillets.

Caslow, the son of Russian immigrants, grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

He is survived by his wife, Charlotte, and sons, Robert and Eric, who took over the business several years ago, seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, Emily Carlow said.

The funeral was in Great Neck on Tuesday.

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