As soon as learned that there was an Alan Ladd family potato pancake recipe floating around in public somewhere, I thought that a) I should try and find it and b) that the potato pancakes were probably “really” latkes. As I understand it, Mr Ladd’s second wife Sue Carol grew up in an Ashkenazi-Jewish-American household, and it would make sense if some of their recipes reflected the cultural-religious influences of her youth.
I’m not Jewish but I have good memories of latkes being made for my elementary school class by one of our neighbours. She would come and tell us Hanukkah stories while she heated lakes for us on a little portable cooktop. They were very tasty, and I enjoyed the stories as well.
While making this recipe I wondered if hash browns are an Americanization of latkes. The timeline seems right, with hash browns apparently first coming to being around the 1890s, right about the time there was a significant increase in immigration to America from Ashkenazim communities elsewhere. So says Wikipedia, anyway, so I’ll stick with this theory of mine for now.
I do not regularly eat either hash browns or latkes – in fact, when I set about trying this recipe, it was the first time since elementary school that I’d had possible-latkes.
I want to thank Jenny of Silver Screen Suppers again for forwarding this recipe to me. I have made it three times so far. I am still working to perfect my technique. You can find a lovely Silver Screen Suppers post with it and other Ladd-related recipes right here.
Here is what the recipe says: with my many notations
2 small brown-skin onions, grated – I’ve used anywhere between 1/2 a white onion to a full white onion in this recipe. I would use “small brown-skin” onions if I could find any, but my local store only has big white or red onions.
4 potatoes, raw, peeled and grated – And now for a lot of comments about potatoes. I asked the internet which kind of potatoes were best for latkes, and the overwhelming recommendation was to use russet potatoes. These are sometimes labelled simply as “baking potato” at the store.
Now, the first time I made this recipe, I just used the potatoes I had at home, which I think were medium sized white potatoes. It worked. The second time, I bought one baking potato/russet and also used a bunch of ‘ruby and golden little gem’ potatoes that I already had. This also worked. Although peeling the little potatoes was a bit annoying. You may ask why, if I was at the store and buying one russet potato for this recipe, why didn’t I buy a couple more. To which I will very maturely respond, “Shut up.”
The third time I made this recipe, I bought and used three big baking/Russet Burbank potatoes.
I would recommend buying russets if you have to buy potatoes for the recipe, if nothing else, it will make peeling easier because russets tend to be bigger, but if you’ve already got some other kind of potato at home and don’t want to make a trip to the store, just use whatever potatoes you’ve got.
The second time I made this recipe I also threw in one small peeled and grated radish, because it was there.
The first couple of times I made this recipe, I was grating with a fine-holed hand-held grater, which was tedious. By the time of my third preparation of this recipe, I was the owner of a new box grater. I used the largest holes on the box for grating, which was faster and easier and also I think partially a mistake as I then had trouble getting the coarsely grated pancakes to stick together. So I currently recommend a medium or small sized grating hole, on a box grater if possible, which I intend to try next time.
While I was researching which potatoes to use, I saw a number of people saying that you should squeeze your potato and onion gratings to get rid of liquid before continuing with latke recipes. I didn’t do this the first time I made this recipe, but I did do a little squeezing the second and third times. There is a surprising amount of water in onion and potato, as you can see in this photo, with some of the liquid squeezed out into the bowl on the right left.
I believe there are many uses for potato-starch water, you could use it, for example, in making potato bread, but I ended up just washed this down the drain. Oh the shame.
I didn’t really notice much of a difference between squeezed and non-squeezed gratings when the pancakes were done. Supposedly squeezing the gratings makes it easier to get toasty crunchy outsides to your pancakes.
1 egg well beaten – I added Salt and pepper to taste to the beaten egg. The third time I also added some ground turmeric.
2 scant tablespoons of flour – I used an actual tablespoon instead of measuring spoons for this. And white/all purpose flour. When I was having trouble getting the pancakes to stick together the third go around, I added more flour and an extra egg to the mix to partially solve that problem.
Mix together 4 tablespoons shortening and 1 tablespoon butter – I only used butter, and while on the first two attempts I held back, I found that on the third try, I used quite a lot to keep things frying. You could also perhaps use another cooking oil of some kind – sunflower oil? Canola oil? Olive oil? Margarine? I don’t know.
Melt in a heavy skillet. I’d strongly recommend you do all the peeling and grating before you start to warm up your pan, because it could take 15 to 20 minutes to get all your potatoes and onion shredded using hand peeler and hand grater, and who wants a pan of butter heating up that long? All your butter will already be melted away by the time you get to it. The first two times I made this recipe I used an aluminum/stainless steel pan, and the third time I used a smaller cast iron skillet.
Drop (the pancake mix into the pan) with a tablespoon and form into pancakes. The first time I made this recipe I used a tablespoon to scoop up the potato mixture, but the second and third times I just used my hands to form the cakes.
Fry over medium heat until one side is brown. Turn and brown the other side. (Requires 15-20 minutes per cake.) I think frying time depends somewhat on how much oil you’re using, but it does take some time. Longer than flour pancakes, that’s for sure. If you are using a cast iron pan, you might find, as I did, that turning the element down to quite low heat works after an initial heat-up.
Drain on a paper towel in a warm oven until all cakes are done and ready to be served.
This is not a recipe you can make in a hurry, but it’s not very difficult, either. It just takes some time. (And it will take more time if you are using a smaller pan!)
How many will this recipe serve? It depends a bit on the size of your potatoes, but I would say if you’re only serving the pancakes, this recipe will serve two or three hungry people very nicely. If you’re serving these pancakes alongside something else, it might be possible to stretch it out over five or six people.
The second time I made up this recipe I served with salmon fillet and salad, as a Sunday feast for two, and I was very full by the time supper was over and had left over pancakes (and fish) the next morning, for breakfast.
The third time I made up this recipe, it was during a very hot period this summer and I made the pancakes in the morning and put them in the fridge, serving them to two after microwaving them for half a minute that evening. They were a sort of lukewarm, and that was quite acceptable during that heat. We also had sorrel soup with them. I froze about a third of the pancakes for use later, and ate left-over potato pancakes for breakfast and snack time the next day as well.
I topped with applesauce, and with cottage cheese. Sour cream is often mentioned as going with potato pancakes.
The third time I made this recipe up for supper, we retired to the home theatre room afterwards, to watch Citizen Kane. Alan Ladd had a few lines as an extra in this much-praised film, “appearing” (he’s in such heavy shadow you can’t really see him) in the last few minutes of the film. (Citizen Kane was released a year before Ladd became a star.)
I can see myself enjoying this recipe a handful of times a year from now on, refining my technique further. It’s a bit too fussy and time-demanding, not to mention messy, with it’s shreds of potato and butter spatter, for everyday cooking, but tasty and easy enough to be a sometimes treat.
Thanks to everyone who has kept this recipe available for fans over the years!
Note: I have also tried the “Hamburger Rodeo” and “Italian Squash” casserole recipe shared on Silver Screen Supper’s Ladd recipe post, but both times I’ve attempted the squash casserole thus far it has not gone well. The first time I used too much tomato, the second time I found that the zucchini I’d purchased for the recipe had started to sprout mold by the time I was ready to cook them up, and I ended up improvising a weird cauliflower/sweet pepper/carrot/pasta sauce plus Thai curry and ugly left-over cheese casserole instead.
It looked like this:
It tasted…okay.
Hopefully someone else will have better luck with the squash casserole then I have so far! I do hope to try it again some day. And I hope to post about it, and the hamburger rodeo, and the other recipes and other other recipes, sometime in the future as well.
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