RECIPE: My Mom's Latkes

Remembering Hanukkah through potatoes and oil.

It’s Hanukkah time, and latkes are on the brain.  They tend to be on the brain most of the year, to be honest, but December is when latkes are really front and center. You know, because of Judaism.  For the uninitiated, latkes are potato pancakes, often bound together by egg and onions and fried to crispy perfection.  However, this description is not set in stone. Anyone who casually leafs through a cookbook by Joan Nathan or Claudia Roden will see that there are a seemingly infinite number of ways to make a latke, all involving different ingredients and methods. The recipe I use comes from my mom.

I am in fact Jewish, which means latkes were part of my upbringing and continue to be a childhood joy I celebrate every year.  Even during the most strident anti-carb stretches of my gay 30s, I lifted all starch embargoes to make room for potato pancakes on Hanukkah.

Latkes are the things I remember most about Hanukkah growing up.  Well, latkes AND the applesauce on the side.  There may have been sour cream too, but I had a deep aversion to sour cream until I was in my mid-teens. That’s when I suddenly realized sour cream was actually amazing and that I had been a monster to think otherwise.  But I digress.

The connection between latkes and Hanukkah comes from oil.  The elevator pitch for Hanukkah is that amidst a Jewish revolt against an oppressive king, Judah Maccabee retook a Jewish sacred site called the Temple. During the subsequent cleansing of the space, a day’s worth of ritual oil kept the purifying flame alive for eight days. A miracle!  And so, to celebrate this big flame energy, we serve food cooked in oil on Hanukkah.  Hence, latkes.

Another popular dish for Hanukkah is sufganiyah, which are basically jelly doughnuts. We never ate sufganiyah in my household growing up, and in fact, I wasn’t even aware of the tradition until about 2006 when a Christian friend of mine asked me, “Is it true you eat doughnuts on Hanukkah?” I thought she was crazy, but it turns out I had been deeply ignorant about my people’s doughnut legacy.  Who knew?  Everyone, apparently.

Even though I was clearly doughnut deprived at Hanukkah, I don’t blame my parents.  There were no traces of sufganiyah at Hebrew school either; so clearly, my corner of the world was strictly focused on the latkes. Imagine all the fried dough I could have been eating.  I suppose there’s a chance that I’ve simply forgotten about the sufganiyah from my childhood.  My memory, it turns out, is not photographic.  In fact, I had a pretty halting moment as I sat down to write this newsletter, thinking I’d be telling all sorts of colorful tales from Hanukkahs past.  But the truth is that sadly, I don’t remember much.

I have snapshots in my brain: receiving a Hess Truck every year from my grandmother; getting an origami book that I obsessed over for months; Bon Jovi playing on the radio (I have distinct memories of listening to “You Give Love a Bad Name” while playing in my brother’s room on Hanukkah).  There are hazy flashes of my family sitting around the table, lighting a menorah.  Spinning a dreidel on the hallway floor. Hoarding Hanukkah gelt.  But my inner filing cabinet is not overflowing with memories, which makes deeply sad — sadder than I would have expected.

Memories, it seems, really only stay alive the more we think about them.  And maybe I just haven’t spent a huge amount of energy thinking about my childhood Hanukkahs.  What may be surprising to some is that Hanukkah is not a major Jewish holiday, and in my home it wasn’t greeted with the same pomp and circumstance as, say, Passover or Rosh Hashanah.  And it definitely couldn’t hold a flame (pun, of course, intended) to Christmas.  Hanukkah was a fun two-night affair for us (we lit the menorah for all eight nights, but the gift-giving and latkes generally petered out by day three), and while the holiday was always something I loved, perhaps its minor nature meant it didn’t earn a huge spot in my memory bank.  Or rather, it wasn’t a holiday that I spent large swaths of time reminiscing about.

Being older now, I feel strange currents of guilt and melancholy about my hazy flashbacks. I wonder if the nostalgia industry built around the Holiday Season has left me feeling unwhole for not having a treasure trove of twinkling Hanukkah memories.  Have all the Hallmark Movies and #tbt Instagram posts given me FOMO about my own holiday experiences?  Maybe.  But I suspect my sadness stems from the gutting reality that over time so many of my seemingly indestructible memories go from being internal home movies to internal Polaroids and then, unfortunately, nothing at all.

Last month, when I was visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, my father found a story I had written when I was in middle school. The assignment was to demonstrate hyperbole, something I had no problems indulging in.  I wrote about how I was so excited for the first night of Hanukkah, how my dad was in SUCH a grouchy mood that evening, and how my brother was absolutely GOADING me into giggling incessantly at the dinner table while my parents tried to do the Hanukkah prayers.  The story climaxes with my dad losing his mind and sending me to my room for misbehaving.  Of course, as the writer-protagonist, I cast myself as the innocent child, framed by a pesky older brother and misunderstood by unjustly strict parental forces.  Surely, I would never be so brazen as to interrupt the story of Hanukkah — my hyperactive behavior was merely the result of nefarious, external forces. Not my fault!

Reading the story again in my, gulp, mid-forties, I became incredibly emotional. It’s not that it caused specific memories to come flooding back, but rather I was filled with a sense of time and place that has long since passed; a moment when my brother and I were just kids acting like fools around the table, years before we had moved off to college, and then, in my case, across the country to Los Angeles.  The experience floored me.

Also, it goes without saying, I felt extreme guilt for making my dad look like such a huge dick. I mean, my Humanities teacher must have been horrified. More importantly, my dad felt terrible for the anguish he had caused me on that Hanukkah, which in turn made me feel terrible for the anguish my story may have caused him two weeks ago.  Maybe the holidays are really just about meta-anguish cycles.  Luckily, many hugs were shared to patch up crimes of Hanukkahs past.

The crazy thing is that despite me going on about faded memories, I actually do remember the night my dad lost his temper at Hanukkah.  But I also remember us all laughing, and then my father laughing at his spectacle, and then the evening continuing on as usual.  It’s a loving and warm memory.  Who knows? Maybe I’ve conflated events or pushed out the less pleasant stuff, but all I have to go on is a deeply biased, hyperbole-focused 7th grade account and my own hazy memories.  At this point, it’s hard to know what is a true memory. I can only rely on what flickers in my brain.

In some ways, my mom’s latkes are the best connective tissue I have to the Hanukkahs of my childhood. They were what I looked forward to the most (aside from presents. Wonderful, wonderful presents), and when my mom gave me her latke recipe in the late Aughts, she informed me that it was something she had perfected over many years.  I’m not sure any latke recipe is ever truly perfected (case in point: my mom has since announced that she’s revised her approach), but as perpetual works in progress go, this one is pretty damn great.

My Mom’s Latkes

Ingredients:

2-3 extra large eggs

1/4 cup matzoh meal

kosher salt

1/2 tsp black pepper

3 large russet potatoes

1/2 onion (I use a yellow onion generally)

1 medium parsnip

Neutral oil such as canola, vegetable, or grapeseed

Sour cream

Applesauce

The Steps:

1. Make the mixture: In a large bowl, mix the eggs, matzoh meal, and about a tbs of salt, and the pepper. Set aside.

   1. Feel free to start with 1 tsp of salt and add more later after you’ve tried a tester latke.

2. Chop one potato with the steel blade of a food processor until finely processed. Then swap out the steel blade for the grating attachment and grate the remaining potatoes, onion, and parsnip.

3. Put the potato mixture into a clean dish towel and squeeze out as much water as you can.

   1. Do this in batches, and prepare for an annoying and messy experience. These damn vegetables have way more water in them than you might expect. If you have a better way of doing this part, I’m all ears.

4. Add the wrung out potato mixture to the egg bowl and mix well.

   

5. Heat a strong glug of oil to a skillet over medium high heat. The amount of oil will depend on how big your pan is (I recommend a 12” cast-iron skillet). Make sure the entire pan is covered. We’re not deep frying here, but we’re also not being demure. There should be about half and inch of oil in there. Don’t stress - you can always add more if it’s too dry.

6. Make a tester: Once the oil is smoking, place a large spoonful of the batter in the skillet. Cook until one side is browned and stiffened. Then flip and do the same for the other side.

7. Remove the tester pancake to a paper towel to let it dry for a minute, and then taste it. If it needs more salt, add another tsp of salt to your batter. Also, keep an eye on the structure. If it’s barely holding together, whisk another egg into the mixture. Repeat with your tester latkes until the flavor and structure is right.

8. Make the latkes: You’re ready for the main event. Add the batter into the hot oil and flatten with the back of a spatula or spoon. I like to use a large serving spoon for this part, which yields three nice-sized latkes (each about 1/4-1/3 cup of batter) in the pan. You are the master of your destiny, which means you can decide for yourself how big you want your pancakes. Do what feels right for you!

   

9. Cook the latkes until they are browned and firm on one side. Then carefully flip and do the same on the second side. Remove the latkes to a rack set over paper towels. Repeat the process, adding more oil if necessary.

   1. Don’t place the latkes directly on the paper towels or else they will get soggy.

   2. The general rule for pancake making, potato or otherwise, is that the first ones will be crap. That’s okay. It’s all about getting into a rhythm with the oil, the batter, and the heat. You’ll be making a lot of these latkes, so you’ll have plenty of chances to make up for ugly ducklings. Also, they’ll taste great no matter how they look.

10. Serve with sour cream and applesauce. If you have an Instant Pot, I recommend this method for a swift homemade applesauce option.

Do you have a go-to latke recipe? Let me know in the comments.