Latkes

All you Ashkenazi Jews out there are surely familiar with latkes, or potato pancakes. Known as a traditional Chanukkah food, it was only brought to my attention recently, although it should have been obvious, that the Jews in Palestine couldn't possibly have eaten latkes: they had no potatoes! In fact, this food only gained popularity, because they are fried in oil, commemorating the oil that miraculously provided light for eight days.
According to this website, the word came into the English language from the Yiddish לאַטקע (latke) came from the Ukrainian оладка (oldka), which is, in turn, the diminutive of the Old Russian оладья (oladya). But wait: it gets better. This comes from the Greek ελαδια (eladia), plural of ελαδιον (eladion), meaning "a little oily thing", "a little oil", or "a young olive tree". ελαδιον (eladion), of course, is naturally the diminute of elaion, "olive oil", which comes from elaia, the (Ancient) Greek for "olive". Whew.

What's funny is that, like everybody knows, latkes are used as a Hanukkah food because they are fried in oil. But who knew that the word for "oil" is actually etymologically related to latke?? Watch this. According to the English Etymology Dictionary: oil, c.1175, from Anglo-Fr. and O.N.Fr. olie, from O.Fr. oile (12c., Mod.Fr. huile), from L. oleum "oil, olive oil" (cf. Sp., It. olio), from Gk. elaion "olive tree," from elaia. Who woulda thunk it?

To put it this way, if the Romans and Slavs hadn't decided to be copycats and steal Greek words, we would not have the word for latke, oil, olive, petroleum, nor Vaseline (gasp!).

So what did those Maccabees eat? To quote The Forward:
The distance from the Yiddish latke to the Greek elaion is about as vast as Diaspora itself, but the relationship is interesting because the first latkes were little cakes made from curd cheese and fried in butter or olive oil. (Eating cheese on Chanukah is said to refer to the Apocryphal story of Judith, who fed salty cheesecakes to the Syrian general Holofornes to make him thirsty, and then plied him with wine until he was so inebriated she could chop off his head with a sword; this symbolic connection, though, was not made until many centuries after the first cheese latkes.) As Jews began to migrate eastward into Eastern Europe, butter and oil grew increasingly precious and expensive, and poultry fat became the chief frying agent; this made the use of cheese off-limits, and so by the Middle Ages latkes were most often made not from dairy ingredients but rather with a simple batter made from buckwheat flour (recall the original Russian meaning of "a flat cake made from unleavened wheat flour").

In any case, bon appétit. Who cares about the etymology? Not me.