Nothing says “Hanukkah tradition” better than a crispy potato latke, right? WRONG!

Even though potato latkes have come to dominate the Hanukkah food scene here in the US in the twenty-first century, they’re actually a relative newcomer to the Jewish culinary repertoire. The potato, a native of South America, didn’t even arrive in Europe until the sixteenth century, and it took much longer than that to attain popularity on the continent. (Fun fact: in the early days, potatoes were thought by many Europeans not only to be poisonous but also to cause leprosy.)

Okay, you may be saying, so potato latkes aren’t ancient, but the sixteenth century is still pretty far back. And that’s true. But it turns out Eastern Europeans—the people you probably associate most strongly with the latke—were exceptionally late adopters. In Ukraine and Poland, potatoes weren’t grown in any significant quantity until 1839 and 1840, when massive crop failures hit the area and growers had no choice but to try the (potentially leprosy-causing) tuber—or face starvation.

Eastern Europeans may have come to the potato under duress, but they quickly became a staple in the region. It’s kind of a no-brainer: potatoes can be grown relatively quickly and easily, in poor soil, and they can be stored through the winter. Also, they’re just a lot tastier than, say, turnips and black radishes.

It’s so strange to think that many of our Eastern European ancestors would only have been eating potatoes for a couple of generations before coming to America. Far from being a familiar heritage food, potatoes were more to them as, say, quinoa (a particularly apt comparison because, like the potato, it is native to Peru) is to us.

The First Latkes

So what were latkes like before the potato arrived on the scene? To answer this one, we need to travel a few centuries back and 1000 miles south, to medieval Italy. The earliest known reference to the latke (though, at the time, it wasn’t called that yet) as Hanukkah food comes to us from the fourteenth-century Rabbi Kalonymous ben Kalonymous who spent his career in Italy, and it was as a ricotta pancake fried in olive oil, called cassola.

Cheese pancakes were a natural fit because they made use of olive oil—harking back to the Hanukkah story’s miraculous jar of oil that should have been enough to burn for only one day but lasted for eight—and dairy.

Why dairy? In honor of the Apocryphal story of Judith, who fed salty cheese pancakes to the invading Syrian general Holofernes to make him thirsty, then got him so drunk on wine she was able to chop off his head without much of a fight. The story of Judith has no real connection to the story of Hanukkah—it takes place hundreds of years before the time of the Maccabees, though the story may have been composed during the Hanukkah story’s Hasmonean era—but, for whatever reason, by the Middle Ages it had come to be associated with Hanukkah, with various Jewish texts of the time pegging Judith as the sister or aunt of Judah Maccabee.

The Latke Moves East

During the course of the fourteenth century, the custom of the Hanukkah cheese pancake spread north to the Ashkenazim, who at the time were mainly based in what is now Germany and France. These early pancakes were made without sugar, but—despite being based on Judith’s decidedly salty prototype—were often served with honey or fruit preserves.

As Ashkenazim began moving eastward, though, dairy became less abundant, and sourcing olive oil in seventeenth-century Krakow? Forget about it.

Latkes made of curd cheese persisted, though—they remained the most common type of latke in Eastern Europe until being dethroned by the potato in the mid-nineteenth century. According to Michael Wex in his Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It, they were often fried in butter, or sometimes in a readily available oil such as poppy seed (!) or, after their arrival from America, pumpkin or sunflower.

With schmaltz (rendered animal fat) being by far the most readily available fat in the region, though, cheese pancakes were not exactly ideal, since the laws of kashrut forbid a dairy latke from being cooked in a meat-based fat.

Now, it just so happens that Eastern European goose slaughtering season happened to come right around Hanukkah time, meaning there was no time of year when the schmaltz flowed more freely. Wex even goes so far as to suggest that the timing of the goose slaughter and consequent schmaltz free-for-all may be the actual reason why it’s become such a thing to eat fried foods at Hanukkah, with the idea of commemorating the miracle of the oil being merely a happy coincidence.

Consequently, a range of dairy-free latkes arose. There were latkes made of buckwheat (which, like the cheese pancake, was a new arrival to Eastern Europe as of the fourteenth century) or rye flour, latkes made of vaguely potato-esque turnips, even latkes made of… wait for it… brains. Yes, according to Wex, brains, in fritters or latkes, or served as an accompaniment to scrambled eggs, were a common Ashkenazi delicacy until quite recently. (NB: brain latkes were not a part of my taste test.)

The Potato Takes Over

Once the potato took hold in the area, it was cheaper than buckwheat or rye flour (not to mention cheese or brains), and so it became the most widespread eastern European Hanukkah pancake ingredient. Wex tells us that while those who wanted to serve their potato latkes with dairy often fried them in almond oil, the most common way to prepare them was by frying them in schmaltz, after which they were often served with roast goose and/or gribenes (goose or chicken skin cracklings).

The bulk of today’s American Jews descend from immigrants hailing from “potato Europe,” and so it’s no surprise that this latecomer latke quickly became the it Hanukkah food, dominating the cultural imagination near and far.

Latkes Before Potato: The Taste Test

So that’s how the potato achieved latke supremacy. But just because it’s the most common, does that also mean it’s the best?

That is the question I endeavored to answer in my latke taste test.

I couldn’t try ’em all (and, quite frankly, have less than zero desire to sample a brain latke), so I opted for what I hoped would be a decently representative sampling: cheese (how could I not?), buckwheat (because I love it), and, for a total wild card… chestnut!

Chestnut Latkes

Wait, what? Chestnut latkes?! But of course! If you read my post a few weeks back on potatoes as the new chestnuts, it all starts to make sense. If you didn’t read it: to recap, before the potato made its way to Europe, chestnuts were a staple food in certain swathes of Southern and Central Europe, whether roasted, boiled, or ground into a flour.  Nowhere did the chestnut have a stronger hold than in… Italy! And even after the potato took center stage, Italians continued their love affair with the chestnut.

So I was intrigued, if not entirely surprised, to find a recipe for chestnut flour latkes in Edda Servi Machlin’s magisterial The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews II (seriously, this book, as well as The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews I, is a must-have if you are even a little bit interested in Italian-Jewish cuisine and culture). Servi Machlin writes that these chestnut flour-based latkes were a Hanukkah delicacy that could be served “as a dessert, as a snack, as an unusual addition to a luncheon, and, omitting the cream, as a side dish to roasted or broiled chicken.” I haven’t been able to find any other references to chestnut latkes as a Hanukkah food, though I admit I haven’t searched terribly hard.

So how were they? Though I am a big chestnut fan, I have to say these were my least favorite of the bunch (admittedly, the competition was steep). They were pretty bitter—this is at least somewhat down to user error, since my (highly perishable) chestnut flour dates back to Passover ’18. Even at its freshest, though, chestnut flour has a very earthy taste that can be a little much without other strong flavors to counterbalance it, and on the whole it’s not exactly what I look for in a latke. Also, I think part of what I love about whole chestnuts is that delightfully waxy texture, and without that I’m not sure the flavor alone quite does it for me.

Cheese Latkes

Ah, the OG latke. I opted to base my cheese latkes on a recipe Michael Wex mentions in Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It. His mention goes as follows: “A 1956 recipe for cheese latkes calls for a half pound of dry cottage cheese, six eggs, four tablespoons of flour, and a pinch of salt.” That’s it. Nice and simple.

Nice and simple, but totally delicious. I played around with the proportions a bit but didn’t add any additional ingredients, and these latkes totally rocked. I think these may indeed have dethroned the potato latke, at least in my books—remember, the cheese latke fell (marginally) out of favor not due to not being good, but rather due to the scarcity and expense of the ingredients back in the shtetl.

And there are so many ways you can jazz these little cheesy nuggets up. You could add some lemon zest to the batter, then top with lemon juice and powdered sugar. You could serve them with jam (that’s what I did). You could eat them plain (I did that too). You could go savory, adding in some feta cheese and maybe some dill or chives. I bet they’d be fantastic with the yogurt-feta-scallion sauce from the mamaliga I blogged earlier this year.

Buckwheat Latkes

The last contender! I adapted this recipe from one I found in Joan Nathan’s excellent Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France. Though she reports having found the recipe for buckwheat flour latkes with onion on which hers is based in Alsace, its origins were definitely further east—its name, “gretchenes,” means “buckwheat” in Polish.

So how you feel about these latkes, which are kind of like thick, oniony blinis—will probably depend on how you feel about buckwheat generally. Much like the whole grain, buckwheat flour’s got a super earthy taste that I realize is not for everyone.

I happen to really like it—especially accompanied by the savory onion flavor—and enjoyed these quite a bit, though not as much as the cheese ones. If you love buckwheat, they’re absolutely worth a try, but they’re never going to be as much of a crowd-pleaser as cheese or potato. And even speaking as a buckwheat lover, I’d say potato still gets my vote.

The Recipes

Cheese Latkes

Adapted from a 1956 recipe referenced in Michael Wex’s Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It

1 lb. cottage cheese or ricotta

4 eggs

6 tablespoons flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

Pinch of salt

Vegetable oil for frying

Add cottage cheese or ricotta to a medium bowl. Lightly beat eggs, then stir them in, one at a time. Add the flour, baking powder, and salt, mixing to combine.

Heat a thin layer of vegetable oil in a medium skillet. Drop tablespoon-sized (or two tablespoon-sized, for larger latkes) scoops of the batter into the skillet and fry until browned on both sides, flipping when bubbles start to form around the edges of each pancake.

Chestnut Flour Latkes (Pizzarelle di Farina Dolce)

Adapted from Edda Servi Machlin’s The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews II

3 cups chestnut flour

½ teaspoon salt

1/3 cup pine nuts, optional

1/3 cup dark seedless raisins, optional

1 cup cold water

3 eggs slightly beaten

Vegetable oil for frying

Powdered sugar (optional)

1 cup heavy cream, whipped (optional)

Mix chestnut flour and salt. Add pine nuts and raisins, if using, and water, and stir until the mixture forms a thick batter. Add eggs and mix well.

Heat 1/3 cup oil in a medium skillet. Drop tablespoon-sized scoops of the batter into the skillet and fry until browned on both sides, flipping when bubbles start to form around the edges of each pancake.

Transfer to paper towel to drain. Add fresh oil as necessary for subsequent batches.

Serve when slightly cooled, either plain, topped with powdered sugar, or with whipped cream.

Buckwheat Latkes (Gretchenes)

Adapted from Joan Nathan’s Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France

1 cup buckwheat flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 large eggs

2 medium onions, grated

Vegetable oil for frying

Sour cream or applesauce for garnish, optional

Stir flour, salt, and baking powder together in a small bowl. Beat in eggs, mixing well, then stir in onions.

Heat a nonstick frying pan and add a thin layer of oil. Ladle about 2 tablespoons of the flour mixture into the frying pan and heat, frying until golden, then flip and cook the second side. Eat alone or with sour cream or applesauce.

Sources:

• The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews II (Edda Servi Machlin, 1992)
• Encyclopedia of Jewish Food(Gil Marks, 2010)
• “Everything You Know about Latkes Is Wrong,” the Atlantic (Yoni Appelbaum, December 11, 2015)
• “How latkes took over your Hanukkah table — and how to get out of that rut,” the Washington Post (Susan Barocas, December 13, 2016)
• Jewish Food: The World at Table (Matthew Goodman, 2005)
• “Medieval Hanukkah Traditions: Jewish Festive Foods in their European Contexts,” Food & History (Susan Weingarten, January 2010)
• Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France(Joan Nathan, 2010)
• Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It (Michael Wex, 2016)

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