The History of Potato Kugel

Everything you need to know about this Ashkenazi classic.

Sunday potatoes. Monday potatoes. Tuesday and Wednesday potatoes. Thursday and Friday potatoes. But shabbos, for a change… potato kugel!” – Yiddish folk song

The Ashkenazi kitchen includes many beloved foods. Kugel may be the most popular of all. Defined as a “pudding” (in the British savory side dish sense, not the American sweet dessert), a true kugel must include a starch, eggs, and some type of fat, with no water added. Today, kugels are typically baked in a casserole dish.

Over its centuries of history, kugel has developed into many varieties, though two types are most common today: potato and noodle. Each have many variations, which isn’t surprising for the centuries-old noodle kugel. Potato, however, is a fairly recent addition within the kugel collective.

As the folk song above suggests, potatoes formed such a massive part of the Eastern European diet that it’s hard to imagine Ashkenazi cuisine without them. However, potatoes were barely consumed in the region until the mid-1800s. (And yes, within the overall history of kugel, 200 years is considered recent.)

Rapidly adopted, the highly nutritious and inexpensive potato almost singlehandedly fueled the 19th-century Ashkenazi population boom. Some people ate potatoes for three meals a day, with most Polish Jews consuming around 400 pounds of them each winter. Underscoring their significance, there are around a dozen Yiddish words for potato, including kartofl, bulbe, and erdepl (“earth apple,” a common descriptor in numerous languages).

A good cook would thus incorporate potatoes into existing dishes, but also found ways to create a little variety within an otherwise monotonous diet. Hence, potato became the newest type of kugel, and soon branched into different versions.'>

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