How to Celebrate Chanukah in Glasgow

Celebrating Chanukah in Glasgow presents challenges. It wasn't something I had every tried before, but I attempted this year and it was pretty successful. Here are some tips:

1) Relax - no one will know what you are doing.

I have a pretty diverse group of friends in Glasgow, but not very many of them were Jewish. On the invite list there was a total of 1.5 jews and the .5 didn't show up. I don't even add to the numbers as I celebrate because of nostalgic, complicated family ritual and not actual lineage. So while there are downsides to this, like how stupid the Chanukah story sounds when you are trying to remember the details without access the Wikipedia ("Well, there were these bad guys who did very bad things to a temple once, somewhere..."), but there are also bonuses. Mainly that no one (or only one other person) is comparing your Granny's matzoh ball soup recipe to their own grandmother's. And this is good, because there is only one kind of matzoh ball that should be eaten and it's the one made in strict accordance with Granny's wishes ("DON'T ROLL TOO HARD"). While I'm pretty confident that they are the best in the world, it's best not to get into a debate with someone else whose opinion would only be clouded by sentiment.

2) Improvisation will be necessary.

We celebrated last Sunday a few days before Chanukah officially started. This is because that's when A (who is Jewish for real) was free and I wasn't working. It was better to be able to spend the day getting ready and making some really nice things then to try and do something large and celebratory after work. That would probably have involved everyone eating toast around some tealights.

Because we were already taking liberties with the day, A and I decided that we could just light all the candles in one go. No one else there would care and it would look prettier.

(Because of Alexandros I happen to have a menorah.)

If you can't find the proper candles, use birthday candles because they'll fit in the holders and if you buy the ones meant for old people's birthdays they even look classy. They also burn down really, really quickly which makes it a brief, but dramatic event.

We did this after dinner and a few glasses of wine. Doing it in this reverse order meant that A and I actually sang the blessings surrounded by our friends and uninhibited thanks to the wine. Again, it helped that they didn't have any expectations or functional knowledge of Hebrew, but to my absolute delight, we remembered the words (or somewhere close to the correct phonetic sounds, in my case) and even sang them to the same tune. I forgot the verse that you only sing the first night, but since it wasn't even the first night, it didn't matter anyway.

3) Plan a head.

There is no way matzoh meal exists in Glasgow, but I can easily bring a box with me back from London. I try to do this now and then so I always have the possibility of matzoh ball soup. I really rarely make it, but the box sitting in my cupboard makes me feel more at home and a bit cozier.

I made some extra soup stock the other day because I had an incling that I might want to make a Chanukah dinner in the future. I don't make stock often, but it's useful to do it at some point in the fall, so you are prepared for any holiday you might want to celebrate.

Sour cream is a hard beast to catch up in Scotland. It seems to only roam in a couple of the larger supermarkets. I made sure to plan a bike ride to one to a store laden with sour cream tubs into my morning.

4) Play to your strengthes.

There is one major trait that Glasgow and Chanukah share: they both love to fry things in oil - especially potatoes. This means that the most important aspect of Chanukah dinner, the latkes, will be a breeze to make. And since every culture seems to understand the importance of frying potatoes in some form or another, all of your guests will like them too. I must have made about seven dozen for eight people and they were almost all gone. Just enough for a couple of snacks in the next couple of days. I really think there is a future for latkes in Glasgow. You could have a latke supper, with maybe four potato pancakes stacked on a portion of chips. Add some salt, vinegar and maybe some curry sauce and you'd have quite the meal. It's a culinary miracle waiting to happen.

Other things fried in oil are easy to find here, too. Like doughnuts. My family doesn't usually eat doughnuts ay Chanukah, but as I was already making a lot of other food, I picked some up at the megastore for an easy dessert. Unfortunately doughnuts aren't very traditionally Scottish and they chose to make them in some pretty weird flavours. I got one pack with tiramisu custard filling and one with rubarb and cream. They were slightly stale and had about a scant teaspoon of dodgy cream filling in them. Most of them managed to escape our stomachs. Next year everyone can just eat more latkes.

5) Make more of it yourself.

It's always surprising to not be able to buy things that you absolutely took for granted back home. Like applesauce. It means something different here, and looks more like canned pie filling. I haven't tried it. It was necessary, therefore, to make some homemade stuff for our latkes. Applesauce is a pleasing sauce to make; it's really simple and if you leave the skins on it turns pink. You can also adjust the seasoning and spices and sweetness and end up with just the consistency you want. It's much more delicious than the bottled kind, but it is another pot boiling away on the stove and one more reason to start cooking in the morning.

The other thing that I have never found is anyone who makes challah. Apparently there are somewhere between 5000 and 6000 Jewish people in Glasgow (or just under one percent), but none of them seem to own a bakery. I've always wanted to make one myself, so I decided that this was the time. Besides, thanks to rule no. 1, if I screwed it up, no one would know except A and she would be too polite to say otherwise.

But look at this:

It looked just right! And smelled really perfect, too! I used a recipe from Epicurious, and the whole process wasn't that hard. The texture wasn't exactly the same as the challah in my dreams; I would have wanted it slightly moister. I'm not sure if I would adjust this recipe, though. It could easily be differences in UK flour, or my oven being the wrong temperature, or an error on my part (that's hard to imagine, though). More experimentation is necessary, but it was certainly a heartening first result. Plus, the next morning I had challah toast with Ethel's apricot and almond jam for breakfast and that alone was almost as good as the whole dinner the night before.

6) Forget about some things.

We couldn't find any dreidels. Although I can't say I honestly looked that hard. But given that I've never seen any in my 2.5 years here, I don't think they exist. We could have tried to convert a normal top or some dice, or had I thought about it a day or two earlier, I could have made one out of clay, but in the end we just didn't play. Just cracked open another bottle of wine instead.

We also didn't have any appropriate music, so we listened to Charlie Brown's Christmas. This is approved Chanukah music in my family where we have a decidedly Seth Cohen approach to the holidays, so it felt appropriate anway.

On the other hand we did have these bad boys courtesy of A:

So who's complaining?

Welcome to the start of the Chrismukkah Season!

Comments

[Markie]

As usual, just reading oyur Chanukkah blog made the evening perfect. I'm so impressed with the challah.

[RiRi]

That is one beautiful-looking challah! Congratulations on your lovely dinner. Yummmmm.