Whole Lotta Latke
My grandparents potato pancakes had a secret ingredient: my grandparents
by Stephen Fried
From Philadelphia Magazine December 1988
I really wish I could say that the aroma from our Hanukkah latkes was wafting through my grandparents’ house. After all, holiday aromas are supposed to waft. Freshly baked bread wafts. Roasted turkey wafts. All your major fruit pies waft. My aunt even made some green beans once that wafted. (Oh no, wait. I’m sorry — those were redolent.) But I’d be lying if I said that the aroma of our traditional Hanukkah potato pancakes was wafting through the house. Because latkes don’t waft. They have two basic ingredients. Potatoes and oil. And none of that lightweight safflower stuff either. Crisco. Oil’s oil. Potatoes and oil don’t waft. They may infuse your clothes, your hair and your very being with a smell that won’t go away for days. But they never, ever waft.
And I don’t care. All through my life, I knew that if I wanted wafting, I could come back on Yom Kippur for those incredible little milchik rolls my Nana always made for breaking the fast, or on Purim when the hamantashen my other grandmother made arrived, or on any Friday night when chicken soup with matzo balls or kreplach was cooking on the stove. But sometimes you want to eat food that doesn’t waft. Like a cheesesteak. Like fried chicken. Like anything else you just throw into oil and cook and cook and cook until it clogs your veins just looking at it. And then you eat it, knowing that even though God gave us the Ten Commandments and love and trees and all that, His greatest gifts to mankind almost invariably are deep-fried.
There’s very little conversation, except for the running tally of how many latkes everyone has eaten and the pleas to pass the latkes. For as long as I can remember, there have been 15 to 20 assorted Frieds around my grandparents’ dining room table on Hanukkah — sometimes the college kids skip the High Holidays and come home for the latkes — and I never once recall a substantive discussion about anything. Except for the year that my brother’s girlfriend, who had never seen a latke, asked if there was any whipped cream because she thought it might taste good on a latke. This, of course, led to endless discussions about the absurdity of putting whipped cream on latkes, until somebody actually tried it and it wasn’t too bad. I think the same thing happened with jelly another year with another girlfriend.
My Pop-Pop, who looks like a Jewish Cab Calloway, makes the latkes. It is, I think, just about the only thing he knows how to cook, although I do have a vague recollection of him grilling wieners at a barbecue. Until last year, he was assisted in the latke effort by my Nana, who cooked everything else every other day of the year. I had Friday night dinner with my extended family every week until I left for college. Nana made every dish. Today Nana is in the Jewish Home recovering from a stroke; what now wafts through the house is a bittersweet scent of sadness and longing for her presence. So my mother and aunt must split her grating — in all senses of the word — duties. My mother’s latke innovation has been a scheme to separate the potatoes into several batches and grate them to different thicknesses in the Cuisinart. This is, of course, not as authentic as hand grating and leaves the latkes without the ingredient my Nana always said was essential: knuckle blood. But the food processor saves everyone a lot of time, which can be spent doing something useful, like buying me more gifts.
A normal human can eat about twice as many latkes as standard pancakes. Six, seven latkes is enough for most people. I usually try to get into double figures and, depending upon whether or not my weight is approaching quadruple figures, I’ve been known to eat 18 or 19. My middle brother holds the record, which we believe to be 24 or 25. While I’m very proud of him, that’s one record I’ve never regretted not having — along with the world land cheesesteak record, which I believe is held by my friend Geoff, who once wolfed down four Pat’s steaks after a bike race.
I made latkes myself once. I was in my apartment on South Street and my Nana and Pop-Pop had sent me the recipe, but I couldn’t figure it out. Or maybe I didn’t want to figure it out. There’s something about the dishes that someone else has always made for you. Maybe you don’t really want to know how to do it yourself. Maybe it makes the other person seem a little less essential to your life. Maybe it just de-ritualizes the ritual. I never asked my mom about it, but I bet it feels strange to her that she makes the gefilte fish on Passover now that Nana can’t. Anyway, I couldn’t get my grandparents to drive over and make the latkes for the party to which I had already invited people. So Nana got on one extension and Pop-Pop on the other and they talked me through it, like the air control tower talking down the rookie pilot in some bad airport movie. They took me through all the steps — the peeling, the grating, the mixing. I even heated up a little oil and tasted one to see if it worked. It did. I hung up and went about getting ready for the party. What they forgot to tell me, of course, was that you can’t let the batter sit while you clean the house and buy paper plates and plastic utensils. Potatoes turn real brown real fast. They still taste the same, but they look different. So the latkes I made ended up tasting just about the same as my Pop-Pop’s. But they looked so radically different that, for the record, I guess I’ve still never really made latkes.
My apartment smelled like oil for a week. And there was no wafting of any kind.
* * *
Pop-Pop’s Latkes for 16
[He swore this recipe was right, but we usually play around with it]
20 lbs. of white potatoes
6 large white onions
12 eggs
1 tbsp. baking powder
1 tbsp. salt (more to taste)
6 tbsp. flour
1 cup seltzer
Peel potatoes and grate them. Grating can be done by hand (the best and the most painful; use the flat hand-grater with the crisscross wires) or in a food processor. If using a processor, try grating some finely and some more coarsely to get good body. After the potatoes are grated, drain off as much of the water as possible.
Chop the onions finely — once again, by hand or in the Cuisinart — and mix with eggs in a blender. Pour that mixture into the potatoes and add the rest of the ingredients. Don’t let this mixture sit too long!
Fill frying pan with ¾ of an inch of Crisco or any other vegetable oil. Heat until very hot.
