Happy Hanukkah! The festival of Lights officially begins at dusk on November 27, 2013. Tonight when the first candle is lit there will be fried food in my house. I will be eating traditional latkas tonight. Tomorrow I will eat turkey by candle light to celebrate Thanksgivikkuh and save a couple of calories. A latka is a potato pancake with a poor man’s pedigree, a history, a tradition and a soul. But potato latkes weren’t originally a part of Hanukkah cuisine.
The holiday dates back to 168 BC, when the Syrian-Greek King Antiochus captured Israel, and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. On the outskirts of Jerusalem, guerrilla warriors called Maccabees continued the fight.
Once the battle was over, the Maccabees rid the temple of idols and lit the golden menorah with a little purified olive oil they found, just enough to burn for one day. A miracle happened and the oil lasted for eight days – the exact time it took to press fresh oil. To commemorate the Miracle of the Oil Jews all over the world eat foods fried in oil on Hanukkah.
Over the centuries, those who wanted to observe the tradition developed recipes using ingredients available in the countries they lived. In the Middle East and the Mediterranean fresh-pressed olive oil is used to fry foods, because Hanukkah falls at the end of the olive-pressing season. Italian and Moroccan’s serve chicken fried in olive oil, and Greek, North African and Turkish people make different kinds of olive oil-fried puffs of dough for dessert. A doughnut by any name.
For villagers living in Ireland, Germany, Russia or Poland, pickings were slim in winter, and potatoes were cheap and available from the root cellar. Grating and making potatoes into little patties to be fried, fed hungry children with just a few potatoes and very little fuel. Without olives to press schmaltz, fat rendered from a chicken, duck or geese was used for frying like todays French fries.
There is no single correct latke. Purists like their latkes to be all potatoes, with a pinch of onion, while others fry patties of grated carrots or other vegetables such as Jerusalem artichokes, beets, turnips, zucchini or squash. You see it is not the potato that takes center stage on Hanukkah but light.
Interestingly enough, though, when I researched the word “latke,” I learned that the word latke comes from Yiddish, a language spoken by East Europeans and that some sources claim it derives from the Old Russian oladka, a diminutive of olad’ya, from Greek eladia, the plural of eladion, which means “a little oily thing” and comes from elaia, which means “olive.”