Zucchini Pancakes with Tatbila Sauce

Zucchini Has Always Been Part of My Family's Sukkot Celebrations

Sukkot is an important holiday in the Jewish calendar, a joyful celebration of the harvest that begins each fall, five days after Yom Kippur. Traditionally marked by the creation of a sukkah, an outdoor structure with open walls and a loosely woven roof where families serve meals and host guests, the holiday lasts for seven days, with an especially festive meal shared on the first night. Families often decorate the sukkah with symbols of the rich harvest, like leaves, branches and fruit.

In my childhood home outside of New Haven, Connecticut, our sukkah would be piled high with stacks of giant, overgrown zucchini. My father, Ed, kept a large backyard garden plot that produced bushels of tomatoes, basil and the aforementioned squash. My dad single-handedly tended our garden. My little brother Roy and I were too busy with other summer activities like catching caterpillars and maintaining suntans, and my mom, Sara Lee, was definitely a stay-indoors type of gal. Dad disappeared into his suburban jungle every weekend, popping out at the end of the day with a pile of uprooted weeds, a few plump tomatoes and, frequently, a whole lot of squash.

Said squash would be wordlessly deposited on our orange Formica countertop, my dad expecting them to be washed and transformed into something delicious by my mom. Sara Lee's nose was frequently in a book, but in July and August, it was probably a cookbook, and she traded that week's New Yorker for the latest issue of Gourmet or Bon Appétit in her search for zucchini recipes.

To her credit, she came up with some good ones. With practice, her zucchini bread went from dry-ish bricks to moist, golden loaves that we sliced and smeared with Temp Tee whipped cream cheese for breakfast. Roy still has an aversion to ratatouille brought on by an excess of experimentation with the genre, but I remember her straightforward New York Times version as bright, summery and fresh with basil. And we ate an awful lot of sautéed zucchini slices, coated with butter and showered with grated Parmesan cheese.

I found no less than a dozen zucchini recipes in the "Vegetables" section of Mom's flowered, contact-paper-covered file box, packed with 4-by-6 index cards holding precious recipes written in ink or cut out of periodicals (only after they were tested and approved). Zucchini Fritti. Courgettes au Gratin. Stuffed Squash from Deccan. Lisa's Almost-But-Not-Quite-Zucchini Quiche (a dish created, apparently, from the skinless centers of very large squash baked in a pie).

But the all-time favorite height-of-the-season zucchini utilizer was her Zucchini Pancakes. The source of this recipe is unclear. The yellow card is written out in her sloping, fine-point script, annotated only with the words "Recipe Club Favorite," although I never knew her to join a recipe club. A simple fritter, really, of grated, drained zucchini mixed with a little flour, eggs and fresh herbs, then griddled. I can still visualize them on our blue Arabica plates at the picnic table, next to a grilled lamb chop, perhaps, a just-picked ear of corn and a sliced garden tomato dressed with basil leaves, freshly ground black pepper and olive oil.

I share this recipe as the perfect Sukkot appetizer or side dish to serve to the guests in your sukkah. No vegetable represents the bounty of the family harvest better than the zucchini, and the versatility of the dish is astounding. Mom served them hot or cold, without sauce or further embellishment, to celebrate the simplicity of the squash itself.

I love serving them with a chunky fresh tomato sauce or a creamy avocado ranch, but here I offer a vibrant Middle Eastern accompaniment known in Israel as tatbila sauce. Similar to the Palestinian or Egyptian hot sauce called shatta, this deceptively simple, four-ingredient condiment provides brightness and heat with the golden pancakes, and is also often served with falafel, grilled meats or hummus. I chose this sauce not only for its Levantine heritage, but also for its reliance on the season's harvest of chile peppers. The lemon juice is a nod to the citron or etrog, a sukkot symbol, along with the lulav (a sheaf of willow, date and myrtle branches tied with a palm leaf), representing once again the bounty of autumn's harvest. Keep a jar in your fridge to bring a memory of summer's hot and joyful boredom to your fall celebrations.