I used to comfort myself by imagining that even the world’s best chefs had one secret dish that defied them. I knew I was probably fooling myself, but it made me feel better about the dish that had continued to elude me, even after several years of becoming a much better home cook.
My steaks were perfectly rosy. I could cure my own lox and roll my own sushi. But I just couldn’t succeed at… Oh, I can’t say it! Even worse, this was an ancestral dish. (I was born in the former USSR, in what is now Belarus.) My ancestors shook their heads in their graves every time I approached the stove to make it. Especially my grandmother, who was epically good at it.
There was even a recipe for it in my memoir-told-through-recipes, “Savage Feast”! Okay, okay. Deep breath. I was terrible at draniki, as they were called in Belarus. Deruny in Ukraine. Oladi in Russia. Zeppeliny, according to my grandmother. It was time to say it in English: Potato latkes.
They never cooked all the way through! If I did manage to cook them through, it was only because I’d left them in the pan so long they had carbonized into dust. I couldn’t solve this on my own. So I called my mother. I like finding reasons to call my mother.
She comes from a different country and culture. She has lived her life according to different principles, and I don’t often have the opportunity to ask her advice. But she makes a mean plate of potato latkes, as good as my grandmother’s, though she would brush away the comparison. I did better than call her. I drove from my home in New Jersey all the way to Delaware, where she lives, to watch her make them.
My first mistake, she showed me, was using too little oil. When I find a recipe for jam, I cut the sugar nearly in half, and the result is lovely. When I make sourdough-discard biscuits, I use far less butter than the recipes demand, and they still come out perfectly creamy. But it turns out you can’t negotiate with latkes about oil.
Then there was the potato mash. I had been wringing it out with my hands. Not good enough. You have to wrap it in cheesecloth and squeeze for dear life. And after the latkes have crisped on both sides, you pour a little water into the pan, cover it, and let them steam for a while so they can, you know, cook all the way through.
I could tell that, to my mother, nothing could have been more obvious. But she is such a gracious person that she did her best to hide this. What she couldn’t hide was how much it meant to her that I had come all that way because I wanted her guidance on something.
The only advantage to my lame latkes was that nobody wanted to eat too many. It’s hard not to put away a dozen or more of my mother’s. They taste like family, like home, whatever that means. Very few things do. You just have to know how to make them.
Now I do.
I need to lose my mojo with another ancestral dish.
I need a reason to call my mom.
I need a reason to call my mom.
– Boris Fishman
Boris Fishman (www.BorisFishman.com) is the author of the novels “A Replacement Life” and “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo,” and the memoir-in-recipes “Savage Feast,” all published by HarperCollins.
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