Geraldine Brooks summer cookbook recipe: Crispy Latkes
Creamy mashed, crispy smashed, jacket roasted and anointed with butter, pan fried with sliced onions, deep-fried to limpness, over-salted and wrapped in newsprint – however they come, I love potatoes.
Every day this summer, we’ll publish an exclusive recipe from a favourite Australian author, dishes made with affection for family, friends or someone special.
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My mother Gloria could grow anything: grapefruit as big as your head, the sweetest apricots, the best tart-sweet Christmas-time tomatoes. But the potatoes were the most fun.
Unlike the peas, beans or chard – the vegies that matured in plain sight – the potatoes were mysterious. You planted the unpromising, withered little wedges and then kept adding straw and soil, taking it on trust that something was happening underground.
SUMMER COOKBOOK: THE WAY TO THE HEART
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Crispy Latkes
Creamy mashed, crispy smashed, jacket roasted and anointed with butter, pan fried with sliced onions, deep-fried to limpness, over-salted and wrapped in newsprint – however they come, I love potatoes.
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Summer Cookbook
Australia’s favourite authors share their most meaningful recipes.
Harvest time was a treasure hunt. Mum would hum an Irish ballad as she plunged her hands into the mulch and pulled out fist-sized spuds in always astonishing abundance. Creamy mashed, crispy smashed, jacket roasted and anointed with butter, pan fried with sliced onions, deep-fried to limpness, over-salted and wrapped in newsprint – however they come, I love potatoes. Blame my Irish genes.
But it is my Jewish mum-in-law, Ellie, whose potato recipe calls to me in December. This year, between the 18th and the 26th, we celebrated Channukah, which remembers the liberation of the Jerusalem temple from the Seleucids. Supposedly, the re-lit temple lamp burned for eight nights when the liberators thought they only had oil enough for one.
We celebrate this holiday with food cooked in oil. Never mind that ancient Israelites had never seen a potato. Crispy latkes are the star of the menu.
Making them is an act of love. While some people assert that you can make latkes perfectly well ahead of time, Ellie didn’t believe that. To do them well requires slaving over a hot stove, and on a Sydney December evening that can be a big ask. But I follow Ellie’s way and make them one or two at a time, sizzling hot, straight from pan to plate, their lacy edges brown and crispy, their insides creamy, with a cooling dollop of sour cream or tart apple sauce on the side.
The recipe is, of necessity, inexact, as how starchy the potatoes are will determine the quantities of other ingredients needed. I think of it as bubbe cooking – the kind you get better at with experience, so that by the time you’re a granny, you absolutely have it down.
1kg potatoes
1 large onion
½ cup scallions, chopped
1 or 2 eggs, beaten
Up to ¼ cup matzo meal
Salt and pepper
Vegetable oil (I prefer peanut, if allergies aren’t an issue)
1. Grate potatoes and onion on the large side of a box grater. Put in colander over a bowl to drain for a few minutes.
2. Pour off the water, leaving the starchy stuff, and mix this well in a bowl with the potato, onions, scallions, salt and pepper.
3. Here is the judgment call: depending on how much starch the spuds yielded, add one or two beaten eggs and just enough of the matzo meal to form a nice batter that shapes well into small pancakes. I make my latkes about the size of my palm so they cook quickly and evenly. Shape them and let them rest in the fridge for about 10 minutes or so.
4. Heat the oil. Slide latkes in one at a time, never crowd them. About two minutes a side should do it. You want them golden with crispy edges.
5. Drain for a few seconds on brown paper then slide right on the plate. Esn! Esn!
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Geraldine Brooks is the mother of two hungry boys and a voracious chocolate lab. She still grows potatoes and tomatoes, but they’re never as good as her mum’s. She wrote her latest novel, Horse, mainly in the kitchen.
Horse by Geraldine Brooks, Hachette.