Draniki Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Draniki are made by peeling and grating potatoes, binding them with a little flour, adding chopped onion, and frying the mixture into thin cakes in oil. The name itself describes the method, coming from the Slavic root drat / dzerts, 'to grate'. Crisp and fragrant from the pan, with the chewy softness of potato, they are an everyday food of the countryside.

The potato, this dish's main ingredient, is native to the Andes of South America; it took firm root on Eastern European tables between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Once the crop had spread through the countryside, the simple act of grating potatoes and frying them in oil became a daily routine, and draniki became an everyday dish. Its earliest appearance in print is in Jan Szyttler's cookbook Kucharz dobrze usposobiony, published in Vilnius in 1830 and widely read across the Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian lands. That date marks only that the dish existed by then; it is not the year the dish was born.

Draniki began as everyday country fare and later rose to the standing of a national symbol of Belarus. That a plain home dish came to be spoken of as an emblem of the land is itself the interesting part of its history.

The story most widely told about draniki is that it is a Belarusian dish with a distinctly Belarusian origin. The record, however, shows this grated-potato cake fried in oil being made in much the same period not only in Belarus but also in Ukraine (deruny), Russia, Poland (placki ziemniaczane), Lithuania and Jewish homes (latkes). No single country's exclusive invention can be established from the sources.

Since the very name comes from the act of grating, the same dish could arise independently wherever potatoes had spread. The idea of draniki as Belarus's national dish came to the fore from the twentieth century onward, in the shaping of national cuisines and in tourism writing, and it does not prove a birthplace. No single birthplace emerges; the claims of several lands stand side by side.

The date of the dish, on the other hand, can be pinned down fairly firmly. Potatoes became a staple in the villages of Eastern Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Szyttler's cookbook of 1830 already includes the dish. The birthplace cannot be fixed, yet the period is clear.