Nathan Jones: “Latkes”

Latkes

by Nathan Jones

I recently read a terrific 2015 article from The Atlantic titled “Everything You Know About Latkes Is Wrong” by Yoni Applebaum. If you’re interested in food, the Bible, or a brilliant, holiday-themed read, I highly recommend it. As I have contemplated all of the changes happening in our church that gathers on the south corner of Cajon and Olive, meditating on this article has provided me great comfort in recent weeks, though when it comes to its thesis, I could hardly disagree more.

Applebaum argues that “there’s nothing traditional about the contemporary American latke” and he has a point. While latkes are often celebrated for their connection to the miraculous oil of Hanukkah, Latkes themselves–made with potatoes and fried in oil–couldn’t possibly go back too far in Jewish cultural tradition because potatoes were first cultivated in the Andes region of South America. Europeans found out about their potential for golden-fried goodness and then took them back to Europe in the 16th century, but they weren’t widely cultivated there until the 18th century. Applebaum doesn’t just take a knife to the potato’s traditional role though, he also bursts the traditional bubbl(ing oil) association with Hanukkah. In latkes’ journey through Eastern Europe before arriving in America, they would have been fried in schmaltz, not oil. Not familiar with schmaltz? Think of that bacon or sausage grease someone in your family may have saved in a jar for later use to fry something like breakfast potatoes, but schmaltz would have been rendered from goose or beef fat. Of course, once Eastern European Jews emigrated to America with their latkes, they wouldn’t have been using oil then either, and cookbooks and advertisements of the period record that they tended to use America’s own miracle fat, Crisco. Applebaum goes on with journalistic rigor to document how buckwheat or rye would have served in the potatoe’s place in Eastern Europe and anyway, it all goes even further back to Jews’ history frying cheese pancakes in Italy in celebration of Judith, whose name after all sounds a lot like Judah Maccabee of Hanukkah fame, right? But outside the similarity of the phonetics, it turns out there really isn’t much of a Jewish biblical connection between Judith’s cheesy pancakes and the Hanukkah story, and the cheesy part itself only appears in a rarer, somewhat dubious text that appeared in some medieval Catholic Bibles.

All things considered, you might find yourself persuaded when Applebaum concludes that when it comes to Jewish cultural history, latkes are thoroughly not traditional, they’re simply “a shredded Andean tuber, fried like a buckwheat pancake, which was substituted for Italian cheeses, once eaten to honor a mistaken reading of obscure variants of an apocryphal text.” In Applebaum’s journalistic, Truth-o-Meter treatment, latkes fail the purist’s traditional test. But what qualifies as tradition? A cultural practice handed down unchanging across the generations? Or is tradition a cultural practice that represents the culmination of a history lived by a people, a living record of inheritance renewed by change and adaptation? I must concede that no Jew from Abraham to Moses on through to Jesus, nor anyone else living through the subsequent 1600 years of Jewish cultural tradition would have recognized a potato as a traditional ingredient. Latkes’ fried Hanukkah decadence could hardly differ more from Passover’s inarguably traditional and decidedly unleavened matzo. Latkes may fail to capture and preserve a single cultural moment or practice as matzo does, but surely latkes record and pass on a tradition of adaptation, of a diverse cultural heritage that is synthesized in the latke and becomes tradition.

This interpretation resonates with my own experience of family tradition, culture, and food in which influences from Welsh, Puerto Rican, and other cultural practices blend together. For my family, it simply wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without my greatgrandmother’s buttermilk biscuits and my abuela’s arroz con gandules (a Puerto Rican rice dish). Neither is a perfectly traditional historical artifact, particularly the rice because since I’ve become vegetarian, abuela now heretically prepares it without chicken or chicken broth, and often without ingredients that are hard to find outside Puerto Rico. Caribbean cuisine generally and my grandmother’s rice in particular seems akin to