Hi friends,

In a fried potato frenzy this week cooking up crispy goodness. When is a spud not relevant for any major holiday? With a dollop of homemade applesauce and tangy tofu sour cream you too can revel in the best vegan, gluten free, flavor packed latke this Chrismukkah / Hanukkamis. (Which one has a better ring?) Scroll on for the link!

As I evolve beloved foodie traditions this year, I’m finding certain comfort in techniques and preparation. We may omit the all purpose flour and the egg, but my hands can perform the same ritual. A ball of potato, onion, spices, and binder–rolled together quickly and uniformly. A press of palms to find a disc shape and even with my eyes closed, my fingers know where to coax out even edges. It’s a practice committed to muscle memory, rote movements recalling moments in my mother’s kitchen just out of reach of popping oil. Come December, it’s this nostalgia I crave.

Regardless what you’re celebrating this season, I hope you’re whipping up some new-stalgia of your own. Intentional time between the bustling and business of it all. And might I remind you–potatos are oh so perfect for any holiday occasion.

This week we have an in depth history of our favorite starch from writer Thursday Bram, just to satiate that other cozy carby craving. Read on!

Stay hungry,
Hawnuh Lee | Founder, Closed Loop Cooking

Crispy vegan latkes.

• Prepping for the potato party with these crispy vegan latkes, homemade applesauce, and tangy tofu sour cream! You can even watch me make them live on KATU, they’re that good.

• Try adopting a community fridge this holiday season, even better with friends!

• Speaking of nostalgiacore.

• I’ll be making these peppermint chocolate crinkle cookies into the new year.

• Isaias Hernandez sat down with environmental lawyer Steven Donziger for an epic interview. (You can sign his petition here.)

• Really appreciate this take on ADHD + eating.

Peppermint chocolate crinkle cookies.

Latke, Future Tense

A history of the potato pancake by Thursday Bram

I love latkes: the crispness of fried potato with more fluffy insides than hash browns, the double whammy of apple sauce and sour cream to cut through lingering oil, the feeling of eating food I know my grandparents and their parents loved, too. If I had to pick only one meal to eat for the rest of my life, there's a good chance I'd pick latkes.

I'm not the only one, either: these days, latkes show up on restaurant menus year-round. Here, in Portland, Oregon, there was even a restaurant that focuses just on serving latkes until earlier this year. They're a symbol of the holiday of Chanukah, but they're also one of the more common experiences of Judaism for many non-Jews. There's even a yearly debate held at the University of Chicago on whether latkes are better than hamantaschen, which has featured such notable debaters as Martha Nussbaum and Milton Friedman.

Latkes are fundamental to being Jewish, perhaps only second to challah as the most iconic of Jewish food. They're a tradition that stretches back two millennia, to the Maccabean Revolt and a key symbol of Jewish culture.

Unless they aren't. Unless we're making assumptions. Unless that whole last paragraph isn't true.

We can't have potato latkes without potatoes

Latkes, in today's form of a potato pancake, only date to the late 18th century or early 19th century. Potatoes only reached Europe in the 1500s, as one of the spoils of Spanish conquest of the Incan Empire. Even then, Europeans used potatoes for animal fodder, before  advocates pushed it as a foodstuff for poor people.

That's the point when the potato changed the course of history. That's not an exaggeration — eating potatoes virtually ended famines in Europe, at least until the mid-1800s. Due to factors like the Little Ice Age, European farmers saw their plants become less and less productive starting in the 1300s. Famines became routine, until the arrival of the potato doubled the amount of food those farmers could produce. They were even able to build up food surpluses as they continued to grow more potatoes. That surplus had mixed consequences: some historians, like William H. McNeill, have argued that European empires and the Industrial Revolution were only possible because potatoes were such a stable food source.

Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Poland, Ukraine, and other northern European countries embraced potatoes alongside other Europeans. Some communities even adopted potato greens as one of the options for karpas (vegetables) on their seder plates every Pesach. An Ashkenazi family might eat potatoes at every meal. That meant plenty of potato leftovers to fry up. In the 1800s, latke recipes began appearing in Yiddish cookbooks. By the turn of the century, latkes were included in The Settlement Cookbook and other American cookbooks.

Just add potatoes to the pancakes you already make

The latke, initially, was as much a meal meant to use up leftovers as it was intended to celebrate Chanukah. Veggies, cheese, flour, and anything else on hand could be mixed together and fried into a tasty pancake. Those pancakes fit in well with the long-standing Jewish tradition of frying treats for Chanukah. However, these pancakes were very much a European tradition, customized for whatever part of Europe a particular Jewish community found itself in. One of the more likely theories of the evolution of these Chanukah pancakes starts with Italian Jews making ricotta pancakes in honor of Judith's defeat of Holofernes starting around the 14th century. That tradition isn't in the Book of Maccabees or the Book of Judith (both of which are apocryphal and not actually part of the Torah anyhow). The best guess is that those Italian Jews got the idea from a Hebrew translation of the Vulgate Bible, through Catholic Europeans. There's no unbroken chain of latkes back to an idealized Jewish homeland.

Meaning, latkes are an Ashkenazi tradition, rather than a Jewish tradition. Ashkenazi Jews settled in Ashkenaz (what we now call Germany and northern France) around the 8th century, then spread eastward into modern Poland, Ukraine, and their surrounding countries. Ashkenazim are only one of several traditional communities within Judaism. Those other communities have other traditions, reflecting what foods were available to the community at midwinter, either still growing or in the pantry: Sephardic communities (from the Iberian peninsula) have been frying leek fritters for Chanukah for centuries. North African Jews eat salty cheeses during Chag haBanot, a night of Chanukah devoted to celebrating daughters. Some of these traditions have roots much closer (both temporally and geographically) to the era of the Maccabees than latkes.

Maybe that shouldn't be surprising, considering that Chanukah itself has dramatically changed in even the last century. American Jews led a reinvention of the holiday, at least in part to match the growth of Christmas celebrations. But other Jewish communities have also found meaning in the military victories commemorated by Chanukah in the last century.

And what are you even frying those pancakes in?

The miracle of Chanukah is really two-fold: First, a small guerrilla force defeated a much larger professional army. Then, when restoring the Temple (which had been profaned by that recently defeated army), the Maccabees had only a tiny amount of olive oil, enough to light the Temple's menorah for only one night. That oil, though, lasted for eight whole nights. It's not a surprise that we commemorate the holiday by frying donuts, fritters, and everything else we can think of in olive oil — or other oils and fats.

Olive oil is one of the oldest documented cooking oils. Our best guess is that humans have been producing olive oil for more than 7,000 years. There are even olive tree orchards with trees thousands of years old, though several of the oldest trees are considered at risk of destruction. The Al Badawai tree, for example, has been growing in the West Bank for perhaps 5,500 years. In the last fifty years, more than 800,000 olive trees in the West Bank have been destroyed, including some only minutes away from Al Badawai.

That lengthy history, however, doesn't mean that all humans had easy access to olive oil. Sephardic communities could certainly have found olive oil to cook leek fritters with a thousand years ago. But Ashkenazi communities, far from places olive trees could grow, found other options, like animal fats. Animal fats weren't ideal for kosher cooks who wanted cheese in their pancakes, but for potatoes and other veggies, they added flavor and calories to the dish.

When Ashkenazi Jews started immigrating to the United States in large numbers in the late 19th century, they had new options for frying. Not only did industrialization mean that both vegetable oils and animal fats were available more widely and more consistently, it also guaranteed the invention of entirely new oils and shortenings.

Crisco premiered in the US in 1911. The company quickly saw the value of promoting vegetable shortening as an animal fat replacement for Jewish cooks. Crisco is not just kosher — it's parve, meaning it can be served with either milk or meat. In 1913, marketers labeled Crisco as something "the Hebrew Race had been waiting 4,000 years for", and Jewish cooks agreed. Crisco became a preferred way to fry latkes for Ashkenazi-Americans, at least until consumers began to understand the health risks associated with hydrogenated fats. Since then, olive and other vegetable oils have been more common, although some cooks have also returned to using animal fats.

That quintessential latke you think of, made with potatoes and fried in olive oil? It can only exist now.

The next evolution of the latke

But the story of the latke is not nearly done. Even now, home cooks and professional chefs alike routinely experiment with latkes. Many of those experiments focus on the produce available locally to a given community, as well as local traditions. I've seen recipes for beet latkes, yucca latkes , and even chile rellenos latkes. Every aspect of the latke is up for negotiation, though, as long as the resulting latke is right for the place you're in and the ingredients you have.

And we need more latke experiments, as well as more adaptations of other Jewish foods to the times and places we now find ourselves in! Our world is changing in so many different ways right now. As we try to imagine the future, we know we need to make food more sustainable. Perhaps that will mean grocery stores will stock more locally grown produce and fewer vegetables that are out of season. Perhaps it will mean that olive farmers will develop varieties that are hardened to heat and require less water. Perhaps it will mean changing the way certain companies monopolize potato production. Until we try new options, we can only guess at where the latke may go.

Ultimately, I still expect that fried pancakes will grace Jewish tables at Chanukah for centuries to come. They may even be called latkes. But they will match our ideas of latkes about as well as our ideas match those of Ashkenazi Jews prior to the European introduction of the potato. They will continue to evolve, which makes them a better icon for a Jewish future than a symbol of a Jewish past.

Thursday Bram is the creator of A Haggadah of Our Own, as well as numerous zines about Jewish traditions. You can find Thursday online at ThursdayBram.com.

I just want a Frog and Toad holiday season.

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