THE TRUE KUGEL :

A Kugel for the Holidays: Mom's Version and Mine (Edward Schneider, September 4, 2002, The Washington Post)

My mother came to the United States in the 1920s at the age of 12 and quickly became the family Yankee, at least compared with her six elder siblings. But in
some respects she has always clung to tradition, including the tradition of making a potato (or noodle) kugel on major holidays -- and invariably on Rosh Hashanah.

To my mind, there is no good translation for the Yiddish word kugel. Pudding? Perhaps. Casserole? Possible, though it's a stretch -- with its echoes of canned mushroom soup and crushed potato chips, it just doesn't sound old-country enough. Let's just call it a kugel. The German word Kugel means sphere . . . or bullet. That sounds, literally, leaden, and kugels can indeed be pretty substantial. But there are few better accompaniments to the Rosh Hashanah brisket or roast chicken.

Basically potato kugel consists of grated raw potatoes mixed with flour, bread crumbs or (for my mother) matzoh meal and, usually, eggs. There are all manner of variations -- with onions, mushrooms, carrots and whatnot -- but these, it seems, were not made by the Jews of my mother's childhood neighborhood outside Czestochowa, Poland, so for her they do not exist.

Note that the raw potatoes must be reduced to extremely fine micro-shreds -- a near puree. A few years ago, my mother gave me one of her four old Acme graters (yes, that's the real name). My Acme looks like a small rectangular tennis racquet strung with razor wire. It is the ideal instrument, even if using it always -- always -- results in bleeding knuckles. Few readers will have such a thing in their kitchen drawer. But, before my mother felt able to part with that Acme grater, I discovered that a food processor does a good job too, and that is what I recommend using.

Unlike many other people's potato kugels, and unlike the ready-made versions you sometimes see in stores -- quite thick, and oven-baked until too dry -- my mother's is less than an inch deep and is cooked in a frying pan slowly enough and with sufficient oil to create a very crisp mahogany-brown crust that encases a soft, moist interior tasting of little more than potato, even though it is fairly rich in eggs. In fact, some people would probably not even call my mother's version a kugel; they might call it a bulbavnik ("potatonik") -- but not to her face, or to mine. My mother's skillet kugel is the kugel of my childhood, and of my adulthood; it will undoubtedly be the kugel of my old age. I mean, what other potato kugel does one look forward to eating cold the next day? For me it is the True Kugel, and I accept no substitutes.

Speaking of awe... Posted by Orrin Judd at September 7, 2002 8:24 AM