Although we might think that the potato latke is timeless, Jews have been frying up potato pancakes for Hanukkah for a relatively short time. “The Maccabees never saw a potato, much less a potato pancake,” writes the great Jewish food historian, the late Gil Marks. And yet the smell, the taste — and perhaps the grated knuckles — of fried potato pancakes are a central part of the Hanukkah experience for many Jews today.
Both white potatoes and sweet potatoes originated in the Americas, and Europeans did not encounter them before colonization. As Marks traces in his “Encyclopedia of Jewish Food,” the white potato first made its way to Europe around 1570. At first, Europeans were extremely suspicious of the tuber, considering it poisonous or even a source of leprosy. When they did start planting potatoes, they fed them to livestock. The French turned to eating potatoes during a famine in the 1790s, and the Germans joined them in subsequent decades. But even as more people started eating potatoes in Western Europe and in the United States, elites looked down upon them as “poor person’s food.”
Eastern Europeans, who ate a variety of other starches, did not turn to the potato until they suffered from a series of crop failures in Ukraine and Poland in 1839 and 1840. Once potatoes began to be considered fit for human consumption, however, they quickly replaced buckwheat and legumes as staples of the Eastern European diet. And Eastern European Jews, it turned out, loved potatoes even more than their non-Jewish neighbors. According to Marks, there are nearly a dozen Yiddish names for potato — not for different varieties of potatoes, but derived from different linguistic regional influences, including bulbe or boulbe in Lithuania and Northern Poland; karfotfl in Central Europe, from the German; and kartoshke in Eastern Europe, from Slavic languages.
As Marks recounts, in the medieval period, fried foods and dairy foods became popular for Hanukkah, referencing the story of the miraculous oil that burned for eight nights in the menorah in the Temple and the tale of Judith, who fed Assyrian general Holofernes cheese before killing him, saving Jerusalem from destruction. Soft cheese pancakes, which combined the two traditions, were especially popular Hanukkah foods in Southern and Eastern Europe.
“And then the potato arrived,” writes Marks. Central and Eastern European Jews adopted potato pancakes as a Hanukkah dish that was cheaper than wheat or cheese pancakes. German Jews brought the tradition to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, and latkes have only increased in popularity ever since. It is hard to imagine that only two hundred years ago, Jews had never considered eating a potato latke for Hanukkah.
I teach a course on the history of Christmas and Hanukkah in the United States at San Francisco State University, and the first thing that I teach students is historian Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of “invented traditions.” These are the traditions that seem like they go back to antiquity but are actually fairly recent constructions. The power of invented traditions is that their illusory long histories make them seem more authentic. Potato latkes are such a tradition. For many of us, they have become central to the stories we tell ourselves about Hanukkah. When we make or eat or smell latkes, many of us recall family gatherings and celebrations with friends on Hanukkah in years past, the stories about our lives that help us understand who we are and where we come from.
One time when I was teaching about the development of holiday traditions, a student asked me how I could do the work of unraveling holiday practices and still celebrate those holidays. She felt that learning the holiday histories might extinguish some of their magic. On the contrary, I think that learning how quickly new rituals become meaningful can add to that magic. How eager we are to tell stories about ourselves and our ancestors and how well we can incorporate new traditions into old ones is the delight of human creativity.
This year as you prepare potato latkes or other holiday foods, perhaps you will think of the ways these foods connect you to ancestors, or perhaps you will turn to some innovative new recipes, adding to the long history of Jewish culinary innovation.