Chanukah: Advent #4

(Spread the Light by Yoram Raanan)

Welcome to the fourth in a series of short posts about seasonal eating in film, music and literature. I will be sending these out every few days, some will be paywalled, and you should think of this series as a kind of literary advent calendar. Chanukah/ Hanukkah (I use these terms interchangeably) is not ‘Jewish Christmas’, but it does intersect with Advent, and its focus on light is deeply and comfortingly familiar to everyone. Chanukah begins on the eve of Kislev 25 and continues for eight days. Chanukah 2021 runs from Nov. 28-Dec. 6 and I write this on the morning of its seventh day.

‘It was the time for gladsomeness.”

(Sydney Taylor’s ‘All-of-a-Kind Family’)

“They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat,” goes the Jewish joke (which was initially about Passover, but you can apply it to pretty much any Jewish festival). It is a brilliantly concise example of narrative history. “Stories convey meaning to group existence: when there is no story to be told, there is no point belonging to a community, a nation, or a people,” wrote Henry Abramson, and he goes on to explain that exhortations to record history “as it actually was,” must adapt to include who the Jewish people “actually are”, at any given moment. Judaism is a dynamic faith and culture that maintains a fundamental connection with tradition. But the movement must always be forward.

In the book, Eat Something: A Wise Sons Cookbook for Jews Who Like Food and Food Lovers Who Like Jews, Evan Bloom tells us that if there’s one thing pretty much every Jew can do, it’s eat. “And we do, with more fervour and focus than most,” he writes. “Our lives as Jews revolve around food in a way that’s at once fanatical, logical and comical, and, to be honest, kind of pathological.” Jewish diasporic eating has its roots in survival, commemoration, and a “basic obligation, by birthright, to pile our plates high.”

Chanukah is “the season of skinny candles,” says Marge Piercy. “A time to eat fat and oil, a time to gamble for pennies and gambol.” It is a celebration of fried food to commemorate the rededication of Jerusalem’s Holy Temple following the Jewish victory over the Syrian Greeks in 165 BCE. The temple oil kept the menorah lit for eight days and nights. A little light can travel a long way, transforming darkness into light as it goes. In the case of Chanukah, “who we actually are” is a people who have settled worldwide, survived, thrived and fried.

By necessity, thriving means adapting, and there’s a wealth of books centred on Chanukah food that celebrates diasporic diversity. Some of the loveliest are for children. I particularly love Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas, a book about a multi-cultural family (mum is Indian, dad is Jewish) who integrate traditional Indian foods into their celebrations, and Hanukkah Moon about Isobel and Aunt Luisa from Mexico, who fills their piñata dreidel with candy to welcome the Luna Nueva (that always arrives during Januca). And for adults, Amanda Ruben’s Feasting covers all manner of holiday treats and melds flavours and techniques from all over the world, including advice on keeping kashrut and how to adapt the recipes.

Jews are storytellers through food, deed and word. Their children begin to learn this in uteri. I remember working with a pregnant Jewish doctor whose husband and children would take turns telling stories about their history to the unborn child and sibling during Shabbat. She explained it to me as needing her unborn child to know the voices of its family, regardless of how long ago they died. Perhaps that’s why Jewish Fairy Tale Feasts resonates for me. It’s a perfect bridge between childhood, adulthood and ancestry.

For adults, the historian Karina Urbach is to publish Alice's Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother's Cookbook in spring 2022. First published in Vienna in the 1930s, So kocht man in Wien! (This Is How We Cook in Vienna!) was a bestseller until the Nazi’s stole her copyright. This is the story of a book and its creator.

The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern is a sharply amusing novel set in Tennessee where a Jewish teenager, looking for hamburgers, discovers a 19th-century rabbi in his family’s freezer in a timeline that spans centuries, ancestral countdown, assimilation, and the pressure “the marvellous past” meld and part in a dizzying way.

Two of my favourite Jewish food and history writers are Joan Nathan and Claudia Roden. They are both legends. Roden’s work needs little introduction: here she is in conversation with Simon Schama. If you haven’t already got it, you need this book. Joan Nathan is American, and when When Jewish Cooking in America was published in 1994, it won both the James Beard Award for Best Food of the Americas Cookbook and the IACP / Julia Child Cookbook Award for Best Cookbook of the Year. Nathan has authored eleven books to date; I find it hard to choose between them, but if pressed, I’d suggest adding The Jewish Holiday Cookbook, Quiches, Kugels and Couscous, King Solomon's Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World, and The Children’s Jewish Holiday Kitchen to your collection.

The Vogue guide to Hanukkah with a recipe for latkes from Frankel’s Delicatessen & Appetizing.

Chaya Rappoport’s Instagram feed is sumptuous.

Here’s Joan Nathan’s ‘genius’ latke method (NYT. It reminds me of this beautifully lyrical piece by Aaron Vallance, to whose newsletter, 1 Dish 4 the Road, you must subscribe.

Alan Silberberg’s Meet the Latkes about a family of potato latkes (who are also clueless) is a great holiday read for children, based as it is on an (understandable) atavistic fear of extermination. A giant dreidel is used to fight the evil alien potatoes from Planet Chhh. When it is time to introduce children to this aspect of Jewish cultural history, this is how to start that conversation.

And I found a Hanukkah film for you all! Mia Kirshner stars as Christina, a restaurant owner who discovers her Jewish ancestry and connects with her newfound Jewish family over Hanukkah. Christina is a restaurateur, and her love interest is a food critic, so it could not be more suitable for the theme of this newsletter.

Leigh Koenig is the author of 6 cookbooks, including The Jewish Cookbook, Modern Jewish Cooking and The Little Book of Jewish Feasts. I love her ‘Little Book’ series.

An American Pickle is not specifically about Chanukah, but it is about pickles (or the transformational magic of brine!), marrying an old-time feel with Bowie songs in the soundtrack.“It’s been one hundred years, and the pickle brine preserved him perfectly.”

I love The Nosher, and the section on Hanukkah is a treasure trove of diasporic writing and food. “ I had leftover brisket in my fridge, spring roll pastry and guests coming, so my first thought was: let’s turn this into lumpia! Lumpia is always a crowd-pleaser and easy to fry ahead and serve at room temperature. My brisket lumpia was merely a quick Filipinx/Jewish experiment, but it tasted so wonderfully familiar. I had forgotten that my mom’s lumpia’s recipe is really mostly carrots and onions just like Grandma Esta’s brisket,” writes Abby Ricarte.

A spider gets its first taste of Hanukkah.

In Babka, Boulou and Blintzes, Michael Leventhal tells the story of Jews’ involvement with chocolate accompanied by 53 traditional and new recipes, many by famous food writers and chefs, including the Honey & Co team in London.

Jew-ish: A Cookbook: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch by Jake Cohen is a joyful book and, therefore, particularly suited to the Festival of Light. The food of his Ashkenazi heritage melds with the Persian-Iraqi traditions of his husband as he traces the story of their marriage through the food they cook together for Shabbat. “It’s not like babka is going to bring peace to the Middle East,” he writes. “Yet somehow, no matter where I am, the waterworks begin when I start writing about my connection to Judaism.” This is a book about identity, Pride, and Jewish pride.

Nigella and Helen Goh rate Now for Something Sweet by Monday Morning Cooking Club very highly. The recipes are drawn from Jewish kitchens across Australia and the rest of the world.

Bendigamos is the Ladino version of the traditional Hallel and is sung on the seventh night of Hanukkah. If you click on the Vimeo link here, you’ll be able to hear it.

Chag sameach!