In the midst of a family gathering, Jon Stone’s folks had a problem: There was a steak in the freezer and a sweet potato in the fridge, and they needed to make dinner for extended family members in town. His dad wanted it to feel a little more celebratory than usual … without making a last-minute trip to the grocery store.
“We didn’t have much on hand. There was steak in the freezer and some potatoes and a sweet potato and my dad said: “Let’s make steak and latkes.’” Stone recalled “There was a big controversy about me adding the hot sauce, so I had to make a separate batch.”
And he did. After two small russets and one big yam, he switched gears a little, turning a bottle of Frank’s Red Hot sauce upside down and watching it gush out over the orange-and-white mixture. Butter went in. Then shakes of garlic powder, sending up tiny clouds as they settled on the batter. The widely accepted egg made it in. His result — a buffalo-style, garlicky sweet potato latke far sassier than its golden-fringed counterparts — is now a family favorite, surfacing at not only Thanksgivukkah 2013, but every Hanukkah before and since.
That was just one of several New Haven latke tales with a twist that surfaced during a special edition of WNHH radio’s “Kitchen Sync” timed for the celebration of Hanukkah. After a call for recipes on social media, Elm Citizens popped out of the woodwork eager to tell their own rendition of how they make the famous fried potato pancake, and what it means to them. For an uncertain story that started in my pint-sized kitchen with a botched Smitten Kitchen recipe and a little, twitter-style encouragement from food blogger Deb Perlman to “try potato starch and baking powder,” however blasphemous they might seem, things were suddenly getting very sweet. Or rather, pretty savory.
What I learned first was that, probably because Jews have been making Hanukkah latkes since Rabbi Kalonymus ben Kalonymus declared them Hanukkah food in the 13th century, there’s a general latke template that most can agree on.
Step one: find your potatoes. Turn them slowly, feel the weight of them in your hands; think about the wringing and patting that will need to be done in the sink, the choice between potato drip on palms or on cheesecloth. Map out which parts of the counter and stove run the greatest risk of splatter and runoff. Put out some cooling racks, as not to forget them.
Step two: grate until you can grate no more. Look down. Is there a little bit of blood in the bowl? There should be just a little bit of blood in the bowl, a raw knuckle or two at the very least. Some egg, onion and flour too.
Step three: fry the daylights out of them, singing a song to pass the time.
The rest of it, Stone and five other latke maestros agreed, is highly personal. It often has to do with the latkes with which one grew up — or didn’t.
That was the case for Brian Slattery, arts editor at the New Haven Independent and host of WNHH radio’s “Northern Remedy.” As a dutiful Italian son, he didn’t make latkes growing up. There were always things cooking around the house: eggplant and tomato sauces, greens made several different ways, food out of the Moosewood Cookbook, for which his parents had great affinity. When he was living in New York City after graduate school — probably 2001, he estimated — he tried making latkes to impress his then-fiancee, who is Jewish. Some fantastically goyische latkes came off the skillet. And she wasn’t having it.
“I was raised in the kitchen as a good Italian-American, and have whatever those instincts are … Those served me pretty well for quite a lot of things, right up until I decided that I was going to make latkes,” Slattery said during the episode. “As soon as I was done making them, my soon-to-be wife declared them to be total goy latkes.”
He remembers just wanting to get better, partly for love, and partly for his culinary pride. So he looked at where the recipe had gone wrong, and came to a sudden realization: It wasn’t the ingredients that were the most important part. If you had potatoes, onions, egg and starch, you were probably in good shape. It was “entirely in the execution.”
So each step of that execution got a second look. And a third look. And a tenth. And then he found the key: After the potatoes were treated in the large holes of a box grater, he learned to dry them out between his palms in the sink, squeezing “with all the might my tiny frame can muster” until those shredded russets were nearly desiccated. “Getting the liquid out of those potatoes is probably the most crucial thing you can do,” he told me. Paired with onions cut into oblivion, and hot, hot canola oil, the latkes were proclaimed decidedly un-goyische. Now, he added with a grin, they taste “like a Jew made them.”
Norine Page, a teacher at St. Thomas’s Day School, decided that latkes — and their gastronomic history, paired with dreidel games and Hanukkah stories — needed to make it into the December curriculum. Eighteen years ago, she and another teacher pooled their resources, making what is now the annual St. Thomas latke breakfast a reality.
The secret to a good latke, she told me via email, wasn’t just the execution. It was also with whom you shared it. When parents and students — few of them Jewish, but all of them usually eager — poured through the doors to her classroom each december, potatoes, pans and spatulas in hand, she felt like she had created a sense of family that was bigger than the bounds of religion. “Our rationale,” she wrote, “[Is that] late autumn and wintertime bring dark days and cold weather to many people around the world. We will be exploring some international holidays that bring people together to celebrate and share. Many of these convey the hope for love and warmth through the lighting of candles, lamps, and lanterns during this dark time of year.”
After Page’s email, I wondered about food allergies and dietary restrictions. So I reached out to Caseus’ Jason Sobocinski — not a Jew, or a huge fan of dietary restrictions that aren’t allergy-related, but someone who had responded to my latke questions immediately — about how one might get rid of the traditional egg.
I was in luck.
“What we call potato pancakes at my house are more of like a rosti,” he said. That means peeling potatoes — burbanks or russets are the best — and submerging them in an ice bath, then a towel-lined colander, to dry them out. Then only salt and pepper are added, and “that’s basically the entire recipe.” The whole thing goes into a heavy-bottom pan with butter — or canola oil for vegans — and makes one big pancake.
“We never have leftovers,” he added.
To hear a little bit of latke history, as well as these stories — and others — in full, click on or download the above audio. Happy Hanukkah!