A delicious Hanukkah treat

Even though Christmas steals the limelight every December, there are a lot of reasons to celebrate the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, some of which include jam doughnuts, cinnamon apple fritters and cream cheese apricot rolls, Apoorva Dutt discovers

Ah, December. ‘Tis the season to appropriate another community’s merry traditions with little regard for religious consistency. It doesn’t matter if they believe in Santa or worry about thinly-veiled consumerism — everyone seems to be planning a turkey dinner, a festive brunch or at the very least, a drinking session. Santas are sweating bullets in every shopping mall anddwarfish plastic trees are twinkling everywhere. As far as marketing goes, there isn’t a festival in the world that can beat the birth of Jesus Christ.
So it seems unfortunate that Hanukkah occurs the same time as Christmas. The Jewish holiday, with its dreary history — the commemoration of the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt of the second century BCE — and its customs — lighting candles for the eight-day duration — doesn’t have the same flair as Christmas, which is celebrated mostly by buying lots of things.

Fortunately, the Jewish community was sensible enough to include a menu which sounds like a sugar-crazed 13-year-old’s wet dream: deep-fried jelly-filled doughnuts, cream cheese apricot rolls, potato pancakes, applesauce, cinnamon apple fritters, and so on. Not many of us are aware to this sugar-coated alternative to Christmas. So I felt it my journalistic duty to make all this food, eat it, and tell you about it.

Latkes are spiritual
A quick google yielded kosher-friendly recipes for Latkes (potato pancakes), Sufganiyot (deep-fried jelly doughnuts), sweet cream cheese Rugelach (rolled cookies with a jam filling), and apple fritters. The ingredients are simple, confining themselves to things you already have in your kitchen. The recipes don’t involve long-term commitments (unlike the six to eight hours required for turkey), or investments in fancy kitchenware. This is an ideal situation for a foodie like me who, while very interested in the eating aspect of food, is somewhat less enthusiastic about the preceding stage of ‘cooking’.

The Latkes are the easiest to make. Five to six potatoes are mashed into submission, along with an onion. Add eggs, flour, salt and pepper, and deep-fry the resultant mixture in small batches. The Latkes turn out to be a crowd-favourite when fed to friends — they’re crunchy on the outside and total comfort food on the inside. The oil which the Latke is fried in is symbolic of the oil that kept the Second Temple of ancient Israel lit, an association which accounts for the prevalence of deep-fried food in the Hanukkah menu. So yes, these aren’t the healthiest option, but you’re participating in an ancient ritual. That’s what I told myself as I wolfed down a couple without bothering about details like a plate or an expanding waistline.

Versatile doughnuts
The deep-fried jelly doughnuts require a little more manoeuvring. Mix together the yeast, sugar, milk, salt, butter, cinnamon and eggs. This mixture was kept overnight in the fridge. When I took it out the next morning, the lump didn’t look like it had done much besides sit there, so possibly I did this wrong.

This lump has to be flattened and cut into circles with a diameter of about two inches. If, like me, you can’t be bothered to hunt down a measuring scale, get a Marie biscuit and cut the dough around it. Scoop out some jam on to the middle of a circle of dough, and cover it with another circle of dough. Pinch together the edges till it forms a rotund cookie. And then — surprise, surprise — deep-fry them.  These are best eaten warm, and lose their charm after a few hours. Eaten fresh off the stove, with hot jam spilling out from every bite — they are heart attack good. Angel Bakeries, the largest bakery in Israel, fries up more than 2,50,000 of these during Hanukkah. As a result of the national craze for them, the simple doughnut has become a culinary chameleon — the cheapest version is stuffed with jelly, while others have chocolate cream or vanilla cream.  

Tricky little twists
The Rugelach (which means ‘little twists’ in Yiddish) doesn’t dillydally — right at the start I have to empty the butter and cream cheese into a bowl and mash. Add the sugar and vanilla essence, and toss into the fridge for an hour. Four balls are made of this, each of which had to be rolled out like a pizza pie, dabbed with apricot jam and raisins, and finally cut into eight slices, each of which would be folded into itself to create cute little cookie rolls.

This was the point where Hanukkah cooking kind of went off the rails for me. The dough refused to cooperate, clinging desperately to every surface it encountered. It fell apart at the slightest provocation, and even if forced into a roll, sat there sullenly with jam oozing out of the edges. Of the 30 biscuits I rolled, only 15 survived. The others ended up in a giant, jam-smeared blob of dough in my dustbin. The survivors were coated with sugar and egg, and slid into the oven at 180 degrees Celsius for 25 minutes. They came out looking a lot better than how they went in — browning warmly, with crispy edges.

Wish you good health
The apple fritters are the closest you’ll get to a healthy option. I combined flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and cinnamon, and stirred in milk, eggs and chopped up apples. I took this mixture and — who could have seen this surprise ending coming — deep-fried spoonfuls of it. The glaze for these fritters was made with half a cup of powdered sugar, mixed with a tablespoon of milk, drizzled over the cookies.

The goodies were received with enthusiasm and contented sounds by both friends and colleagues. Hanukkah is the new Christmas — and if all this artery-clogging goodness is making you nervous, don’t worry — that’s what New Year’s resolutions are for.