"Jewish" Food?

Is there such a thing as "Jewish food"? 

I belong to a number of Jewish food groups. Some are more cultural, shall we say, than religious. During the pre-Chanukah season, the page was obviously going berserk for latke recipes. 

One person asked if she could make latkes in the oven. "The point is that they're fried!" she was sternly admonished. Since this was the more cultural page, I was amused. Is this what people think is important about the holiday—frying? The message of anti-assimilation is more vital, me thinks—and relevant.

Potatoes, to begin with, were not around in the times of the Chashmonaim. Chanukah food used to be cheese fritters, but Eastern European Jews only had shmaltz, not oil, to fry with. They therefore couldn't use cheese, so they relied on the sturdy potato that is readily available from winter storage. 

So what we have here is a holiday dish with tenuous ties to the original holiday. Now that we know about smoke point, frying in extra virgin olive oil is not recommended. So, does frying in sunflower oil or butter or shmaltz make something a Chanukah food? Shouldn't we be making more of an effort to consume olive oil, which doesn't necessarily mean frying? (I heartily recommend these cookies instead. Or, even better, good ol' salad vinaigrette.)  

My upbringing revolved around paprikash. The only thing that's Jewish about it is that typical Hungarian paprikash is usually served with sour cream, and the Jewish version is not.  

Jews are a bendy people—that's how we've survived. We learned, as we were shunted from place to place, how to pick up bits and pieces from the current culture around us and make it our own. Like braided challah—it has taken over our lives so much that women think bread HAS to be braided for Shabbos, when, no. That's an echo of a European fad in the 1500s, ladies. If women knew bread for Shabbos doesn't require braiding, maybe they would make it more often. 

I happen to like chremslach better than latkes—and both are fried potato patties. Yet the former is "for" Pesach, and the latter is "for" Chanukah. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's just that in Eastern Europe, people ate potatoes all the time, and had to make do. 

So no, I'm not going to start deep frying on Chanukah just because "you have to fry" on Chanukah. We don't "have" to, especially if frying makes you nervous (it makes me nervous!) and/or not really worth the work for you.

And lately, my timid tastebuds have been experimenting with more "exotic" options, like tahina and silan (I'm so daring, she said sarcastically). 

It's all Jewish food. There's no right or wrong way of doing it, except if it's treif.