Cooking up culture for Hanukkah

Today is Aiden O'Neal's eighth birthday. It's also the second night of Hanukkah. So the large holiday gathering at the O'Neal household will be more festive than usual.

The centerpiece of Susan Black and Richard O'Neal's celebration table is a variety of latkes. And though these crisp pancakes are usually made with potato, they can include a number of grated vegetables, mixed with onion, egg, a little matzo meal or all-purpose flour, and spices, and then fried in oil. ''At Hanukkah, while everybody does potato latkes, I do other things, like zucchini latkes and cauliflower latkes," Black says. ''In Sephardic communities they would do that all the time." Black lived in Israel for almost a decade and learned many dishes she didn't know growing up in an Ashkenazi home.

''This is the only time of the year that I ever fry anything," she says. But cooking in oil is essential to Hanukkah. The holiday, which commemorates the Maccabees' victory over Antiochus of Syria, also celebrates the fact that the sacred oil they found in the synagogue and used to light the menorah lasted not one but eight days.

Black first moved to Israel in 1972, taking a leave from her studies at Wellesley College. At first she lived on a kibbutz, then moved to Petachtikva, an ethnically mixed suburb of Tel Aviv, populated by Jewish families from Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Greece, and Libya.

''Our neighborhood was like a tapestry of all these communities that grew up all over the Middle East," Black recalls. And each one had its own culinary heritage.

Many of the women in Black's neighborhood were old enough to be her mother. ''They knew I loved to cook," says Black. ''They would invite me over for meals. I would listen to their stories and watch them cook. Nobody had anything written down. A lot of it was by feel."

Now Black runs SMP: Strategy.Marketing.Performance, a consulting firm. But she never abandoned her passion for cooking. ''My house is the one people stop by knowing that I will pull together something for them to eat from whatever is in the kitchen," she says. ''All Israelis who live here, when they're desperate for spices [from home], come to my house." She describes her cooking as a ''personalized, very eclectic, multiethnic Jewish cuisine."

Hanukkah celebrations in Black's home have a multicultural feel that goes beyond the influence of her years in Israel. She has always kept a kosher home. Her husband is not Jewish but observes his wife's culinary traditions. Their daughter attends JCDS, Boston's Jewish Country Day School, in Watertown. ''Our holidays are about respecting and understanding who we are and other cultures. The way we celebrate incorporates traditions of my childhood and young adulthood and my husband's childhood home." Aiden will help out; grown sons Roie and Zimran, from Black's previous marriage, will celebrate at their homes in New York and Israel, respectively.

The meal always starts with a hot bowl of soup. ''I come up with all kinds of interesting soups," she says. This year she is making a vegetarian version of a Yemenite recipe, featuring chickpeas, squash, tomatoes, cilantro, cumin, and coriander. A cucumber salad with yogurt accompanies the latkes, or an Israeli salad with chopped tomatoes, cucumber, bell peppers, and scallions. She also makes her own malawach, a Middle Eastern fried bread, and zhug, a vibrant green dip made with fresh cilantro, garlic, and chili peppers.

Dessert is always jelly doughnuts, or soufganyot. ''In Israel, the thing you smell walking down the street [during Hanukkah] is doughnuts," says Black. ''They are more popular than latkes."