DECEMBER
I didn’t know any Jews when I was growing up in my white-bread-and-pork-chop world outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
When I married a Jewish man, he came with a new world of food, some of which required adjustment. Smoked whitefish with the head on for breakfast—I swear the eyes were staring at me—was a big one.
However, I cruised right into Hanukkah. Latkes are fried potato pancakes. Who doesn’t love those? As a devoted new wife, I strived for hours to create grease-free latkes until my husband informed me that the grease is what they’re all about since Hanukkah commemorates a miracle in which one day’s worth of oil kept temple lamps burning for eight days.
Jews have long been part of the South after arriving in Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The settlers, many of whom had fled the Spanish Inquisition, were seeking religious freedom. From 1776 to 1820, there were more Jews in Charleston than in any other American city, according to Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South by Marcie Cohen Ferris.