American Sandwich Project: The Progressive Triumph of the Latke

I have this very strange dream of cooking all the American sandwiches. Why? Because sandwiches are delicious, not horribly complicated, and they’re a great way to learn about the history and geography of the United States. Old and new, East and West, North and South, red states and blue. It’s a project I’ve set out to do several times and then been too broke or busy to follow through with it, but in this time of bubbles and divisiveness it seems like a noble cause. After all, who can hate a sandwich? They’re both yummy and apolitical. Maybe sandwiches are just the thing we need to heal the rifts in our country and bring us together again – at a picnic table, in the sunshine, passing the napkins, talking about the things we all agree on.

Big T is tablespoon, small t is teaspoon, c is cup.

You may recall a couple years back I did an American Sandwich Project on tamales, which seemed weird to some people because tamales aren’t exactly a sandwich. But I wasn’t launching a volley in the “everything is a sandwich” wars; at the end of the essay I showed how tamales actually can end up be-sammified so everyone was happy.

I’m going to harness that same weird sandwich energy this holiday season and talk about some foods that are just as all-American as tamales – latkes, otherwise known as potato pancakes.

Ok, fine, you’re right, originally latkes were not American, but that’s the thing with America, you send us your downtrodden and in exchange we’ll help ourselves to their recipes.

And even though the American Sandwich Project is supposed to be a no-politics zone, as it turns out, the Americanization of the humble potato pancake is actually a shining triumph of progressivism. Wait, don’t go! Whether you totally stan the progressive movement or not, it inarguably had a massive effect on American history, and giving history important context via sandwiches is what I came here for.

If you recall your middle school history, you’ll remember the obligatory paragraph about a woman named Jane Addams, who started something called Hull House, and if you were like me you were like “ok whatevs” and then went back to passing notes about much more interesting things, like Duran Duran, Holly’s terrible perm, and whether or not you were getting a coveted Squire Shop sweatshirt for Christmas (and I DID!!! The elusive pink one too!!!)

But as it turns out, Jane Addams was a profoundly interesting woman who was just a tiny part of a profoundly interesting movement made up of many profoundly interesting women. Contrary to popular belief, women’s history did not, in fact, start with the birth of St. Hillary of Ark(ansas). There were women doing profoundly interesting and profoundly important things all along the way and the lovely and luscious latke, believe it or not, is a part of it all.

Jane Addams, and her counterparts Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, Alice Hamilton, Edith and Grace Abbott, and the incredible, incredibly named Sophonisba Breckinridge, the inventor of social work and the first woman to represent the interests of the United States at an international convention – before Hillary Clinton was even BORN if you can believe such a thing possible, did a hell of a lot more than that dismissive phrase “started Hull House” implies. These women – who for some inexplicable reason were allowed to leave their houses, seek education, and perform societal functions unlike what history books would have you believe – revolutionized the treatment of the poor and mentally ill in America, brought about numerous reforms in welfare and labor laws, and helped to elevate the status and living conditions of their fellow woman. Knowing men, they pushed their way to the front of the line harrumphing loudly and got helped too, the pushy bastards. And believe it or not, before they even had the right to vote, these women and their generational counterparts were also highly influential political activists. You can read more about their political exploits in my piece Wonder Women.

You see, before the creation of Hull House and the other charitable institutions (deemed “Settlement Houses”) these clever and hard-working women founded, the poor were sent to workhouses and poorhouses and asylums, basically written off as unsalvageable brutes who couldn’t ever hope to rise above the social class they’d been born into, and sequestered in tenements to provide cheap labor for the Industrial Revolution.

But Jane Addams et al subscribed to a philosophy known as the “Settlement Movement”, which taught that the best way to help the poor was not to tuck them away out of sight and ostracize them, but to work and live among them, give them opportunities to better themselves, and help them attain skills that would help them to be healthier and happier in the long run.

Give a man a fish, and all that, or in the case of the Settlement Houses, a woman, since most of their energy was expended on helping women instead of men. And while I believe firmly that one can’t housewife your way out of poverty, not even way back then, I do believe that homemakers bring to the family table (literally) the ability to improve their family’s health and standard/quality of living in myriad ways. The women of the Settlement Movement were dedicated to that proposition and set about teaching less fortunate women skillsets to do exactly that.

Because it’s 2021, I am contractually obliged point out that these historic heroines were women of their time and yes, most of them did hold some troubling beliefs regarding social engineering, the likes of which were endemic to the progressive movement at that time (at that time, not today, no way man, nu-uh, not even possible that class-based elitism is still a thing in the progressive movement nope not even remotely). But we’ve got to learn to accept problematic elements as a given from any historical figure. It happened. We should no longer pretend to be shocked by it. When you know better, you do better, and we have the luxury of knowing better now. Let’s focus instead on the good these wonderful women did, a good which was considerable. Without them, without the ways they began to question and push back against the way things had always been (albeit imperfectly by modern standards), it’s entirely possible we’d still be just as mired in the same ugly, tainted mindsets they were.

Up until the Settlement Movement, the notion that poor people were anything more than inferior rejects tainted in perpetuity was not widely held. If you were born poor, you died poor.  Poverty was your lot in life, and while it wasn’t exactly set in stone, it was a belief people held, designed entire societies around, and rarely questioned. Those of us who watch the movie or read the book “Hillbilly Elegy” and applaud JD Vance for applying himself and entering a different social class, rather than writing him off as unsalvageable due to “bad blood”, you’re living the legacy of Hull House. That you could, through industry and ingenuity, change your life and your children’s lives, was a revolutionary – and uniquely American – idea.

The Settlement Houses, with Hull House as the jewel in their crown, did a massive amount of real tangible good for millions of people, and the philosophies espoused by their founders influenced American culture in countless ways. Remember that the next time your history book gives more ink to the Teapot Dome Scandal than the Settlement Movement, whose beliefs and accomplishments still strongly affect American attitudes to this very day.  Yes, even YOU.

Anyway, sandwiches.

One of the most prominent groups assisted by the Settlement Houses were Jewish immigrants who flooded into the United States from Eastern Europe in the late 1800’s. Many women came from the Old World to the New having lived lives of such economic deprivation that they honestly didn’t know what to do with the largesse they encountered in America. Up to that point, they’d lived in vermin-infested hovels that they couldn’t keep clean so they’d never bothered to try, and their families owned but one set of clothes apiece so laundry day was never a pressing issue. They ate bread and meat and cabbage when they were lucky, and nothing when they weren’t. Life was a constant struggle in the pursuit of “luxuries” like heating fuel and clean water.

Coming to America where the cultural expectation was for women to be “homemakers” and keep a neat and orderly house with elaborate foodstuffs on the table was a task immigrants were largely unprepared for. Faced with this skill deficit, Settlement Houses across America set out to teach immigrant women the science of homemaking in addition to all the other amazing things they did.

In Milwaukee, one of the intrepid volunteers was a woman named Mrs. Simon Kander. Her given name was Lizzie, but she personally preferred the more high-falutin’ Mrs. Simon, and I respect her desire to do that even though the custom we happen to use now is different. Anyway, Mrs. Simon Kander was a go-getter from day one. Not only did she courageously hug Ulysses S. Grant as a child, she was valedictorian of her high school class in 1878 and gave a speech called “When I’m President”, kicking Amy Klobuchar’s questionable claim that no one ever thought girls could be president even in the NINETEEN-seventies, right in the crotch.

The juxtaposition of Minnesotan Amy Klobuchar with Wisconsinian Mrs. Simon Kander reminds me to mention how interesting it is that so many progressive heroes are from the Midwest. Even though modern day progressives who are, like, so totally not arrogant elitists in any way, shape or form, any more than I am highly sarcastic, seem to believe the Midwest is and always has been a backwater utterly devoid of thought and culture, which only emanates from places like Harvard and New York City. But the truth is, many of the giants of their own progressive movement hailed from America’s heartland. (Look it up, kids! It’s TRUE!)

Milwaukee. So much more than beer, cheese, fictional home to various sitcom characters, and polka.

Mrs. Simon Kander was active in charity even prior to joining the Settlement House; one of her charitable endeavors was installing a public bathhouse next to the Schlitz Brewing Factory where hot showers could be had for a penny. No more did workers have to shuffle through the streets of Milwaukee smelling of beer – unless they wanted to. Then, because the original charity she’d founded, the Milwaukee Jewish Mission, had run out of space with so many immigrants coming to Wisconsin, a new building had to be constructed.

In cooperation with another charitable organization, the Sisterhood of Personal Service (wow, still more women allowed out unsupervised during the 1800’s! And here I thought Hillary Clinton had struck off the chains of my sex singlehandedly just through her very existence, despite being from this inbred little place in the middle of nowhere, Chicago! Could the media have LIED to me?) Mrs. Kander formed another charity known simply as The Settlement House, in keeping with the settlement houses being built all across America at the time. The Milwaukee Settlement House also had hot showers and was built next door to the Jung Brewery, not only for the benefit of the immigrants who worked there, but also because the brewery generously shared their supply of hot water with the charity.

Beer. Is there anything it can’t do?

Mrs. Simon Kander was named president of The Settlement House – PRESIDENT, just as she’d predicted in her valedictorian speech. But a fancy title wasn’t enough for her. One of Mrs. Kander’s personal pet issues was teaching impoverished women to cook healthy, affordable foods for their family. Since this is also one of my personal pet issues, I have come to find myself very enamored with Mrs. Kander.

At the time, The Settlement House cooking classes involved immigrant women having to copy off recipes written on chalkboards by hand for their personal use; quite a task for people who didn’t even speak English. Making matters worse, many of these women were illiterate even in their native tongue. Mrs. Kander, who taught the cooking classes personally in addition to her duties as president and 10,000 other unbelievable things she did every day, realized that what was truly needed was a good cookbook, preprinted, so the immigrant women could focus their energy on learning the skills she was trying to teach them, instead of struggling just to jot down the recipes.

Unfortunately, here is where sexism actually does rear its ugly head (no one ever said sexism didn’t and doesn’t exist, just that Hillary Clinton did not singlehandedly defeat it in 1994 by simply existing.) Mrs. Kander approached the all-male board who oversaw The Settlement House and asked them for $18 to publish the book, and they laughed at “her little venture”. Luckily, Mrs. Kander, despite lacking the inspirational figure of Hillary Clinton for encouragement, wasn’t good at taking no for an answer and soon she had 1000 copies of The Settlement House Cook Book (subtitled “The Way to a Man’s Heart”, which probably offends Hillary Clinton, but I find perfectly adorable) in her possession.

The Settlement House Cook Books sold like the proverbial hotcake and was officially entered into the Cookbook Hall of Fame in 1976. Mrs. Kander continued on the rest of her life doing several million completely amazing things and then died in 1940 after phoning her niece to come over and help her try a new recipe she was excited about, which in my opinion is an excellent way to go.  

The thing that is so marvelous about The Settlement House Cook Book is that it has recipes for all sorts of foods, not just all-American foods like mac and cheese, but also many the ethnic foods that the immigrant women would have wanted to make, but possibly had lost the skills or never attained to begin with due to having spent their lives in abject poverty. Matzo ball soup, sauerbraten, pate fois gras, hasenpfeffer, gefilte fish, pierogi, Irish potatoes and cabbage, and Swedish meatballs are included in the pages of The Settlement House Cook Book. I have a later edition and Asian-American entrees like chop suey and Sukiyaki are also included. If you happen to come across any edition of TSHCB pick it up; it’s a lovely addition to any cookbook collection.

One of the recipes in TSHCB is for latkes. Don’t you love it when the two heretofore unrelated plots of the movie come together? In a minute Vincent Vega will pop out of Butch’s bathroom and take a latke to the head.

Please note, the glossary of TSHCB is, as with many old school cookbooks, absolutely terrible. I just nearly gave myself a heart attack because I couldn’t find the latke recipe under “latke” or under “potato”, after I’d just spent two hours writing this nice tribute to Mrs. Simon Kander. It was under “pancakes”, along with a truly mindboggling swath of other pancake recipes. I own 123,456,789 cookbooks and there are pancake recipes in The Settlement House Cook Book that not even I have ever seen before. I tip my pancake-batter-coated spatula to you, Mrs. Simon Kander.

Now, onto the latkes!

Latkes are is a traditional Hanukkah food for Jewish Americans. The reason for this is a miracle that happened all the way back in 165 BC, when America was just a twinkle in the Earth’s eye. A mean and very likely insane ruler named Antioch IV refused to let the Jews practice their religion, and tried to get them to behave themselves by acting more Greek, which I assume involves wrestling in the nude while measuring triangles. This didn’t go over very well, and the Jews, under the leadership of a man named Judah Maccabee, revolted. They retook their sacred temple in Jerusalem but upon arriving, found they only had enough oil to keep their eternal flame – the oil lamp always kept burning in the temple – alight for a single night. Much to the Maccabees’ surprise, the oil kept burning for the eight nights needed to replenish the oil.

In celebration of this miracle, Jewish people celebrate Hanukkah, the Festival of the Lights, and because of the oil, they eat fried foods like latkes whilst celebrating.

Now, because you are clever people and/or you read my Irish-themed American Sandwich Project where I talk about potato history, you may think “but how can potato pancakes be traditional Hanukkah food, when the Miracle of the Lights happened in 165 BC and potatoes didn’t get to Europe till after Columbus?”

And the answer is, they can’t. That is why they’re classed as traditional for Jewish-Americans and less so for other people of Jewish heritage. Non-American Jews celebrating Hanukkah are more likely to eat a type of jelly doughnut called a sufganiyot, fritters sweet and savory, or make latkes based on ricotta cheese, leeks, or matzo meal instead of potatoes.  Those sound amazing, and I can imagine a very wild latke party where you made them all and washed them down with several bottles of Manischewitz.

But of course this is the AMERICAN Sandwich Project which is why we’re going the potato pancake latke route.

I personally like latkes (being Irish, I am genetically predisposed to adore everything with potato in it) and have made them on too many occasions to recall. I have had an ongoing problem, however, with burning and undercooked potatoes. Prior to 2020, I’d always put shredded or chopped fresh onion in them, and the onion cooks really fast and begins to burn before the potatoes are done. So then I would panic and remove the latkes from the oil too soon, all too often before the potatoes were cooked well enough.

In fact I’d pretty much stopped making latkes even though I really like the flavor of them, because they never turned out quite as good as I thought they should be. But as a part of my long-term pantry project, I started playing around with minced dried onion in several recipes where fresh onion hadn’t worked well for me, so I decided to give it a whirl.

Much to my great joy, it worked perfectly. For the first time, my latkes were cooked to perfection, crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and not burned at all. I know things like “minced dried onions” are the sort of things that those barbarian Midwesterners eat and everything, but they really did work here, and this is a Milwaukee-themed recipe, so.

While the recipe in The Settlement House Cook Book makes a fine latke, I wanted a bigger batch, enough to make sandwiches with, so I sort of combined TSHCB with a latke recipe from Vegetable Love, by Barbara Kafka.

Latkes

Potatoes are a more or less kind of thing; you’ll end up with potatoes of all different sizes and water levels, thus this is a more or less sort of recipe.

1 ½-2 lbs of potatoes (for me, this was 3 biggish potatoes, peeled. You don’t have to peel them, but my potatoes were green on the outside which is a no-no, so I did peel mine.)

4 eggs (my eggs were MASSIVE. I set them on the counter and my kitchen implements went into orbit around them. I will have to give my hens a raise. If you have smaller eggs, you may want to bump this to five.)

½ t baking powder (one of the recipes called for baking SODA instead. I suspect you don’t technically need baking powder and could use just soda. The soda combined with the slightly acidic chemistry of the potatoes will ~probably~ cause a leavening reaction to occur, but I felt more secure with the baking powder.)

½ cup all-purpose flour (if your potatoes are super juicy, you may need slightly more, if dry, you may need a bit less)

1 T dried minced onion (I used more like 1 ½, but I like onion flavor. You could also use onion juice instead if you have that. You’re just after the flavor without those burnable chunks of fresh onion.)

1 t salt (if you’re eating these as-is, you can add 2 t if you want, but keep in mind we’re going to be using them as bread for a sandwich and too much salt may not be conducive to that)

Pepper if desired

Oil for frying

BEFORE you do anything to your potatoes I want you to scramble your eggs up in a mixing bowl, and in a different mixing bowl, combine your flour, baking powder/soda, and salt. The reason for this is that when you’re dealing with cut up potatoes, time is not your friend. Pretend the potatoes are a Hollywood starlet with absolutely no acting ability – you gotta use em fast, because they will begin to look unappetizing in very short order.

In fact, you should probably have at least one frying pan with a ¼ inch layer of oil in the bottom, and preferably two, ready (don’t turn the heat on yet) to go before you start shredding.

I used an attachment on my mixer to grate my potatoes super fast. If you are grating by hand, I would suggest working as quickly as you can, possibly drafting a second set of hands to assist. After you grate your potatoes you’re supposed to dry them off. I skipped this step in the interest of speed, but by the time I cooked my last batch, the batter was starting to separate, so be aware that this is a possibility, as the potatoes release additional liquid. I just stirred the liquid back in and it was fine.

Once your potatoes are grated and dry if desired, turn your oil on. You want it hot by the time you drop your pancakes in to cook. I put mine on medium.

Mix together the shredded potatoes, the flour, and the eggs till they’re well combined.  This is what it looked like below (the weird square thing is the smoked trout, more about that in a minute):

Using a ⅓ c measure, scoop batter into the hot oil (if you want just non-sandwich latkes, you may want to make them smaller with a ¼ c measure).

Don’t overcrowd the pan; I was only able to get in 3 in my biggest pan. You want the oil temp to stay hot and there to be hot oil burbling around the margins of your latke. Spread them fairly thin because these are going to be fulfilling the role of bread in a sandwich and you want the sandwich thin enough to bite into. (Or you can make an open face sandwich, like I did.)

Cook for about 2 minutes per side. After your first batch is done, I’d taste the thickest part of the thickest one to see if the potatoes are getting cooked through in that time. If they’re not, adjust cooking time slightly (and you can always pop any that aren’t quite done back in the oil for a minute).  Here’s a cooked one:

If you prefer musical instructions, this is fun: 

What do you put on latkes? What DON’T you put on them? Sour cream and applesauce are most common. Fancy people use things like caviar and creme fraiche, which I have never even tasted because I am not fancy people, but the pictures I saw were beautiful.

Since My Harshest Critic doesn’t like sour cream, I went with applesauce, which since I am from Washington State, I am contractually obligated to make myself.

Kristin’s Imprecise Applesauce

Apples (get the softer cooking apples, not the ones that stay firm when cooked. Granny Smith has her place in this world, but applesauce ain’t her forte)
Sugar
Water
Cinnamon, if you must (I mustn’t)
A potato masher (not mandatory but helpful)
Possibly lemon juice but we’ll try to avoid it

This is an imprecise recipe, hence the title. The reason it is imprecise is because it depends. It depends on how many apples you have and of what size, it depends on how juicy they are, it depends on how sweet they are. It depends!

Sometimes life is like that, and recipes nearly always are.

Put a small amount of water in a pot and get it simmering. Like potatoes, apples are very temperamental so don’t dawdle. Peel, core and cut an apple – just in chunks, big ones are ok – and put them in the hot water. You want to get the apples into the hot water as quick as possible so you don’t need to use lemon juice to prevent browning. It’s fine to cut them one at a time and get them in the water fast, and if you do that, you won’t need lemon juice.  Lemon can affect the taste some, so try to manage without it.

If the water starts to boil away, add more. At some point, your apples will start melting (unless you used Granny Smith, who is very stubborn, the old cuss). Use your potato masher and mush them up. If some of them are still too hard to mush, boil them longer. Just be sure you add more water if they start drying out, because your sauce will burn due to the naturally occurring sugars in the apples.

Once they’ve cooked through – be aware, this can take an hour or even a bit more – add your sugar to taste (or not, if you prefer them au natural). And cinnamon. Even a little vanilla extract might be nice, but I probably wouldn’t want that on latkes.

And if you think you hate applesauce, rest assured, homemade applesauce is as far from that insipid stuff in the bottle as you can possibly get.

Potato pancakes with applesauce and/or sour cream are great. But. They are most decidedly NOT sandwiches. So while under ordinary circumstances I’dve just left it there, we’re going to turn these here latkes into sandwiches.

Sandwich construction – This is a process so easy it really doesn’t require a recipe, which is good news since this article is already too long.

I made open faced sandwiches. I put a fried egg and smoked trout on some, and a fried egg and a piece of sausage on others. You don’t get much more upper Midwestern than trout and sausage. They were both fantastic, but the trout was INCREDIBLE, particularly after I added a little sour cream and thinly sliced red onion on top. If you don’t have smoked trout on hand (you poor bastard) smoked salmon or lox will suffice. I decided to call this trout-egg-onion-sour cream latke marinated in the history of progressivism the Leon Troutske, and implore you to go the extra mile to find smoked trout if you possibly can.

As we ate them, and then ate more of them (My Harshest Critic was pleased, praise be to Mrs. Simon Kander, it really was the way to a man’s heart, and if perhaps his heart was not truly touched by the Leon Troutske, at least it shut his mouth) it occurred to me that you could make latke sandwiches with lots of different things. The potato pancakes really were an excellent delivery system for yum; tasty on their own, but not so flavorful that they stole the show.

I could easily envision topping latke with hollandaise sauce, ham, and asparagus for a twist on Eggs Benedict. Thinly sliced apple and melted cheddar and bacon bits would be nice. You could make teeny ones and use them for canape bases if you’re having a holiday party. And if you’re not a meat eater, egg and cheese (Wisconsin cheese), or even just sauteed veg would be fantastic.

Latkes can be made fully vegan, either by using very starchy potatoes and prayers to Gaia to hold them together, or by using vegan egg replacers in lieu of the eggs. 

My latke sandwiches were very breakfast-y. With the addition of some hot coffee, a pitcher of orange juice, and a fruit salad this would be a phenomenal holiday brunch. Or, in keeping with our Milwaukee theme, we could go after hours and wash down some cocktail party latke-based canapes with some ice cold historically Milwaukee-brewed beer – like Schlitz, the “beer that made Milwaukee famous” or the hipster’s fave, Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Here, let’s see what Weird Al Yankovic’s dad* has to say about it:

Festive, cheap, easy, and historical! Happy holidays, y’all!

* Before you wanna-be schoolmarms get yer “well achtuallys” warmed up, despite the coincidental accordions, this is not actually Weird Al’s dad. This is, as they say in the American Sandwich Project article writing business, a joke.