Hand Grated: Potato Latkes

My Grandma Ruth is an incredible cook, but when asked for a recipe, she’ll often claim not to know how to make it. Stuffed cabbage? Brisket? Potato latkes? Grandma claims she works from a cookbook for all these dishes despite having made them hundreds of times. It’s true, in a way, but there must be things she does between the lines of the recipes, things that I could gleam from watching her cook. It was with that in mind that I volunteered to help make the latkes for our Hanukkah party this year at Grandma’s house.

It’s all fairly simple, sure, and Grandma did in fact consult a dizzying number of cookbooks while we worked: Arthur Schwartz’s recipe printed from the computer, a Joan Nathan cookbook, a few community cookbooks thrown in for good measure. At one point I mentioned Martha Stewart’s recipe and pulled it up on my iPhone, so we consulted that along the way as well (the key tip in that recipe is reserving the potato starch after draining and reintroducing it to the batter). Any one of these recipes works fine: they all have varying proportions of potatoes, onions, eggs, flour or matzoh meal, plenty of salt and pepper. Mix it up, fry until golden in plenty of oil, serve with apple sauce and sour cream. Smoked salmon on the side doesn’t hurt things at all.*

Grandma grates the potatoes by hand on the fine side of a box grater, which is what really sets hers apart, regardless of the recipe. It’s a ton of extra work. I usually just grate them in the food processor, because I’m lazy like that. It’s not quite as special, but it’s hard to go too wrong with these. They fry up more like pancakes than home fries when you grate them Grandma’s way. I’m predisposed to latkes like this–call it the latke cognition theory–but there’s absolutely no shame in using a food processor, either. It’s hard to mess them up too much. We’re talking about fried potatoes here, after all.

When we had used up half the batter, we stirred in some cooked frozen spinach, squeezed of excess moisture, and made spinach latkes, a specialty of Grandma’s.

They’re so good. I wish I had some right now.

*Grandma Ruth does not endorse lox with latkes.