Why we eat jelly doughnuts on Chanukah

ALY MILLER

Oily foods have been made to symbolise the miracle of Chanukah since the first celebration, but it wasn’t until the Middle Ages that jelly doughnuts became tied to Chanukah.

Food historian Gil Marks wrote that the first recipe for the jelly doughnut was found in 1485, in a cookbook printed in Nurenberg, Germany, called the Kuchenmeisterei (Mastery of the Kitchen) – one of the first to be printed on Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press.

The original doughnut recipe didn’t have a hole, but rather was a pillowy pocket of dough, filled with jam. The recipe instructed bakers to make a jam “sandwich” with two circular pieces of dough, to be fried in lard.

The addition of jam was revolutionary, as doughnuts had been usually a savoury dish, filled with mushrooms, cheese or meat. Regardless of the filling, doughnuts were expensive treats to make, and not widely consumed. Other fried foods, like buckwheat pancakes, fried radish cakes, and fried cheese curds, were the Chanukah dishes of choice.

Then, in the 1500s, two important jelly doughnut events occurred: the cost of sugar went down with the proliferation of slave-produced sugar in the Caribbean, and the Kuchenmeisterei was translated into Polish. By 1600, jelly doughnuts, called paczki, were beloved throughout Poland on Christmas, Chanukah and other special occasions.

In Yiddish, they were called ponchiks, and fried in schmaltz, goose fat, or oil. Interestingly, unfilled doughnuts, in Yiddish, were simply “donats”.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the tradition of jelly doughnuts travelled with Polish Jews wherever they immigrated.

According to Marks: “In Israel… ponchiks soon took the name sufganiyah (sufganiyot plural), from a “spongy dough” mentioned in the Talmud, sofgan and sfogga. The word sphog, meaning “sponge”, is so ancient that there is a question as to whether it was initially of Semitic or Indo-European origin.

Sufganiyot became specifically tied to Chanukah in Israel, in the 1920s, when the Israeli Labour Federation declared them the official food of Chanukah. What do jelly doughnuts have to do with labour, you ask? While latkes are easy to make at home, sufganiyot provided Israelis with jobs – think of all the baking, transporting, and merchandising behind every box of doughnuts!

To this day, sufganiyot are hugely visible in Israel in the weeks leading up to Chanukah, and they’re stuffed not only with jelly, but with cream, halvah, or chocolate ganache. (The Nosher through JTA)