A Hanukkah feast to remember — no potato fritters allowed. Courtesy of Sam Lin-Sommer
By Sam Lin-Sommer
December 24, 2024
This week, I hosted a Hanukkah cooking workshop where there was one rule: Don’t say the word “latke.”And I don’t think any of the 15 participants missed the dish-that-shall-not-be-named.
The meal took inspiration from Iraq, Russia, China, and Morocco; it employed kimchi, kasha, and homemade ice cream; and started with a tasting of oils made from butternut squash and pumpkin seeds.
The purpose of the workshop, part of a series called “Schvitzin’ in the Kitchen” that I co-founded with my friend Ethan Blake, was to expand people’s thinking about what Jewish food could be. That meant reaching beyond the Ashkenazi canon that often dominates the cultural sphere; it also meant coming up with recipes that celebrate local, sustainably farmed ingredients.
Reflecting on the feast, I have a few ideas to impart to home cooks looking to make a delicious Hanukkah meal this winter. The first is to gather loved ones to help you cook the meal — always a good idea, but particularly so during Hanukkah, when huddling around frying pans with friends and family can lend a cozy glow to a cold winter night.
Reach across the diaspora
To prepare for the workshop, I looked across the world to understand what common threads bond Jewish cooks across oceans and national borders.
There’s a lot to learn from exploring the wide variety of dishes the diaspora has to offer. Perhaps your family traces its heritage to Aleppo, and your Hanukkah traditions include preparing sambousek with a cheese filling and flakey pastry crust. Or maybe you’re partial to sufganiyot, the jelly donut consumed by the millions in Israel every winter. Maybe keftes de Prasa, Sefardic leek fritters, are your family’s annual tradition.
Whatever your forté, now is a great time to step outside your comfort zone. To commemorate the miracle of oil lasting eight days in the Maccabean temple, Jews around the globe dunk myriad foodstuffs in oil, with delicious results: artichokes in Italy; rose-water soaked fritters in India; chicken in Morocco, served with couscous.
And oil isn’t the only ingredient that holds special significance during Hanukkah’s eight days. Many Jews indulge in dishes featuring dairy as a nod to the story of Judith, the feminist Jewish hero who seduced an Assyrian general, knocked him out with cheese and wine, then beheaded him. (While historians think Judith likely lived a few centuries before the Maccabbean revolt, her story has a clear resonance with that of the Maccabees.) In Tunisia, on the seventh day of Hanukkah, women rest and men ply them with dairy pastries and couscous au beurre, a butter-based couscous dish.
In fact, historian Gil Marks writes that the antecedents of latkes were actually ricotta cheese pancakes, enjoyed during Hanukkah by Italian Jews, and perfect for Hanukkah because they combined oil and dairy — honoring the Maccabees and Judith in one dish. When those pancakes spread to Eastern Europe, where schmaltz was the frying medium of choice, cooks nixed the dairy so as not to mix meat and milk, and turned latkes into a meat dish, swapping in potatoes once the South American tuber took off in Europe.
Hanukkah food, like Jewish cuisine more broadly, has always absorbed influences from trade and migration. So take a page from Jewish history and try something new. The Forward’s own Rob Eshman recently wrote about the Italian honey-soaked Hanukkah donut called precipizi — part of a family of syrup-drenched Hanukkah fritters across the Sephardic world. Mexican-Jewish scholar Ilan Stavans recently published a cookbook with a recipe for latkes con mole, which is exactly what it sounds like.
At Schvitzin’ in the Kitchen, we drew from Iraqi tradition to adapt The Nosher’s recipe for fluffy, crispy chickpea sambousek, a stuffed pastry, opting to replace the chickpeas with red-and-white heirloom cranberry beans we stumbled upon at the Union Square farmers market. Spiced with curry powder and cumin and mixed with caramelized onions, the beans made a sweet and earthy filling inside a delicious pastry crust.
Visit the farmers market
Jewish food traditions have always developed through a dance between Jewish dietary laws and local agriculture. For example, wheat, chickpeas, and cumin all originate in the Fertile Crescent, so it’s no wonder that Iraqi Jews perfected combining the three into one delicious fried treat in sambousek — nor that Italian Jews fry artichokes, or that many Sephardic Jews prepare leek fritters.
Wherever this article finds you, you can continue this process of adaptation by embracing the food growing near you. Fresh, locally grown produce is also likely to pack the most flavor and place the least strain on the Earth’s resources.
To bring the Hanukkah miracle into the 21st century, start by taking advantage of oils made from seeds and nuts that grow near your hometown. At Schvitzin’ in the Kitchen, participants started dinner with an oil tasting, dipping sourdough bread into dishes of rich, toasty pumpkin and butternut squash seed oils from Stony Brook Wholehearted Foods in Geneva, New York. For cooking oil, we turned to extra virgin sunflower seed oil from Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna Mills.
If you live in the Northeast, you might also look into oils made from hemp and hickory — the latter of which has its roots in the diet of indigenous peoples throughout the U.S.’s Eastern woodlands.
A week before our workshop Ethan and I ogled a wooden crate of vibrant purple Japanese sweet potatoes at the Union Square stand for Lani’s Farm, which is based in New Jersey. We decided immediately that we’d fry them at the workshop, and pair them with some of the farm’s homemade kimchi. A flavorful fermented condiment with a local tuber; it was a pan-Asian nod to latkes and sour cream.
We served the sweet potatoes over a bed of kasha, and topped them with kimchi, toum — a punchy garlic emulsion enjoyed throughout the Levant — and local dill and parsley. The nutty kasha, aromatic sweet potatoes, and intense, tangy toppings produced what was possibly the crowd’s favorite dish at our gathering.
If farmer’s markets are inaccessible to you because of price or location, you can use an online resource like the Seasonal Food Guide to find out what’s in season near you, and hunt for something fresh and seasonal at your local grocery store.
When it comes to oil, less is more
In addition to being Jewish, I’m Chinese, with roots in China’s Sichuan province. Among many other things, Sichuanese cuisine is known for a technique called “dry-frying,” which uses minimal oil so that vegetables char and develop a dry, toasted flavor. The garlicky fried string bean dish that’s popular in Chinese restaurants in the U.S. is traditionally dry-fried, though many restaurants deep fry their beans for expediency.
My affinity for the technique got me thinking: Could using a smaller amount of oil allow me to better appreciate the medium — its flavor, versatility, and importance to sustaining life?
There are plenty of good reasons to lay off the grease. Consuming it in excess isn’t the healthiest of habits, and oil-heavy recipes can be time-intensive and messy.
Or you might just be conscious of the wastefulness of it all. A key aspect of Jewish cuisine in the United States, and many immigrant foodways, is embracing the availability of cheap food. Many experts say that that way of eating is bad for our bodies and the environment. Dry-frying is a way of meditating on the miracle of oil without an orgy of sizzling fat.
The dry-frying technique can be applied to a wide variety of vegetables, but Lani’s farm was growing gorgeous, thumb-sized eggplants called “fairy tales,” and I wanted to throw those on the pan for the workshop. I adapted a recipe for dry-fried eggplant from Sichuanese food maven Fuchsia Dunlop’s The Food of Sichuan that involved frying the fairy tales on a pan rubbed in oil — in our case, sunflower seed oil — with some sliced chili peppers, and finishing them with sesame oil (for which we swapped with a local toasted seed oil). The end result was a bunch of little, sweet, crispy, spicy eggplants.
If you’re cooking string beans, you can saute them whole on an oil-rubbed pan, occasionally stirring them as they develop scorch marks. Throw the cooked beans into a quick, umami stir fry, like this one from the Chinese cooking team The Woks of Life. One Chinese cooking blogger has described a similar recipe for cauliflower. (Of course, feel free to omit the small amounts of pork that some of these recipes call for.)
The process of dry-frying is slow, and requires careful observation to keep things evenly done, like cooking over a charcoal grill. The smell of oil wafts up, mingling with the aroma of charred produce. You’re conserving the precious fat, like your ancestors did, and the result — a tender vegetable, charred down to its essence — is what I’d call a Hanukkah miracle.
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