By, Victoria Prever
1 min read
When I was a child we sometimes had chicken for our Chanucah dinner. But mostly it was my mother’s pot roast brisket, which I have already pointed out in these pages was the greatest brisket cooked anywhere since the end of the Babylonian exile. Sadly, we stuck with cookies and pastries instead of doughnuts – not that anyone ever had room for many of them.
Why? You probably know why. Because along with the brisket, Chanucah dinner meant latkes.
We occasionally ate latkes on other days, but Chanucah was when potato, grater, eggs and apple sauce came into their own. I was introduced to flayed knuckles while helping my mother grate, and remember the relief we felt when her first food processor ended that blood sport. I remember competing with my siblings, and with myself, to set records for latke consumption. I remember eating some with apple sauce and some without, just for a change of pace.
And I remember going to bed, after dinner, with my belly feeling like a balloon that was fated soon to pop.
