Thursday 28 November 2013

A Bi-Cultural Fress

Last night I fulfilled some of my Booba duties by making latkes. A lot of latkes.


Potato, of course, but I was also talked into making some sweet potato ones too. Ok, I can deal with that. Of course there is no comparison to a golden-brown, fragrant, crunchy potato latke, is there? None of this 'bake in the oven' rubbish, it's Chanukah, embrace the oil!
Then the question of accompaniments. Strangely, even though I was raised with savory latkes accompanied by ketchup in the context of a BBQ, I have taken to the sour cream dollop (no BBQ, obviously) but I don't get the applesauce so beloved of the Americans. I don't think it does either the latke or the applesauce any favors. Feel free to disagree. I guess it's what one is used to. 
(I wonder what we did for latkes in Europe before the 16th century, before the potato arrived from the New World? Kasha? I guess we still do eat buckwheat pancakes, why not?  But I digress.)

So tonight I went to a Thanksgiving dinner - turkey, pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, beans, the whole works- but no latkes. So much for Thanksgivukkah! Not that I could have fit any latkes in, and forget about the sufganiyot, I'm over those already. 
And I'm trying to write this while feeling as stuffed as the turkey. My brain is in a food-induced stupor. 
I'm not the first person to notice that Chanukah and Thanksgiving have a bit in common, main point being that they are both about religious freedom. The Pilgrim Fathers were escaping religious persecution by fleeing the Old World for the New. And the Maccabees beat the crap out of the Hellenist Seleucids (Syrian by geography, Greek by culture) because they were denied freedom to practice their religion and because the a Temple was defiled. Then was the miracle of the oil which we remember while eating fried food (OY, do we remember. The heartburn doesn't let us forget). The difference is in the attitude to the food: with Thanksgiving it is a Seudot Hoda'ah, literally a meal of thanks, but with Chanukah it's the classic Jewish theme; 'they tried to kill us, we won, let's eat.'
Anyway, I reckon sweet potato latkes are the once in a lifetime Thanksgivukkah treat and I won't be making them again until 2021, I believe. And as for the 'healthy' 'latkes' my daughter was reading about -and suggesting I make!- containing cabbage and kale and carrots and onions, I say, that ain't no latke. That's fritters. 
Potatoes = latkes, The End. 

Happy Chanukah!

1 comment:

  1. Deeper than that: the specific religious freedom that both the Macabim and the Puritans sought was the freedom to be intolerant. The freedom to live in a Righteous and G-d-fearing society, where wickedness and impiety are not tolerated. It was the Puritans' intolerance (recall the Puritan who was "a-hanging of his cat on a Monday for killing a mouse on a Sunday") that turned most Englishmen against them, and the Macabee's rebellion started when Matisyahu stabbed a Jew for publicly sacrificing to an idol.

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