THE POST-POTATO LATKE
Creating new Hanukkah traditions
Perhaps no dish is more closely associated with Hanukkah than the potato latke, a flattened disc of grated potato and onion fried gently in oil until crisp and golden. But not everyone realizes that it’s the frying in oil and not the potatoes that connects them symbolically to the eight-day festival, which this year begins on Sunday at nightfall. It goes back to the Maccabees, a small band of Jewish rebels who took up arms more than 2,000 years ago to protect their religion and community against the Greek-Syrian ruler who threatened both. Victorious, they returned to Jerusalem, where they found their temple defiled; legend has it that, when they prepared to rededicate it, they found enough sanctified oil to burn for a day. It burned for eight, until more oil could be prepared. To believers, that was the miracle of Hanukkah. To traditionalists, Hanukkah wouldn’t be Hanukkah without potato latkes. But as the eminent Jewish food authority Joan Nathan observed, cooks who have grown “wildly curious about all foods” want to reinvent the traditional. Count among them Sydney Warshaw and Kat Romanow of the Wandering Chew, a Jewish food collective which organizes food events to celebrate the culture and history of Montreal’s diverse Jewish communities. They will give a hands-on workshop on Tuesday on making latkes with non-traditional ingredients; participants will prepare the latkes, learn the history and eat together. “Everyone has their potato latke recipe. What we wanted to do was come up with some different seasonal recipes. “We wanted to just try to use vegetables in season right now — to use lots of root vegetables and to bring in new flavours, to give people ideas and to use ingredients you wouldn’t usually find in latkes,” said Romanow. “We are drawing on the tradition of latkes, which is always evolving, but using modern ingredients.” She and Warshaw came up with four recipes: A potato-cauliflower latke inspired by aloo gobi, the vegetarian dish from the Indian subcontinent made with potatoes, cauliflower and Indian spices, topped with a raita-inspired sauce made with cumin, cucumbers and mint mixed with sour cream. A carrot-harissa latke, inspired by the Sephardic carrot salad, flavoured with harissa and topped with preserved-lemon yogurt. A celery-root latke made with onion, chives and parsley, topped with smoked salmon crème fraîche, with a kind of Scandinavian vibe. A rye-sourdough latke that uses rye flour and sourdough starter, a nod to a batter that was made in Eastern Europe, with starter used to make rye bread becoming part of a batter for a pancake served with sour cream and butter. “It predates the potato latke — and it’s more of a pancake,” said Romanow, a Jewish food historian and director of food programming at the Museum of Jewish Montreal. “We will serve it with an apple-cranberry compote.” Said Warshaw: “We want people to realize that the point of Hanukkah is to eat foods that have been fried in oil and to take advantage of all the other root vegetables. “It’s an opportunity to try something new and also to consider why we even eat latkes to begin with: It’s that they’re fried in oil, which is the holiday association.” The potato latke is a fairly recent innovation, as the late food historian Gil Marks observed in his Encyclopaedia of Jewish Food (John Wiley & Sons, 2010). They were not planted widely in any Eastern European country with a sizable Jewish community until the 19th century. “The Maccabees never saw a potato, much less a potato pancake,” he wrote. The first latkes, which appeared among Italian Jews, were made with cheese and fried in olive oil, according to Marks. Soft cheese was a luxury, though, and cheese latkes were replaced during the Middle Ages with buckwheat and rye flour as Jews moved eastward. They also used turnips and other vegetables, he wrote. It was only in the mid-19th century, after a series of crop failures in Eastern Europe, that potatoes were planted there in large numbers.