HANUKKAH

For Italy's Jewish communities, the festival of lights means one thing: lemony fried chicken.

- LEAH KOENIG

FROM EASTERN EUROPE'S POTATO LATKES to rustic Moroccan doughnuts called sfenj, Jewish communities around the world celebrate Hanukkah by frying foods in oil. The oil commemorates the Hanukkah story of the Maccabees, a small Judean army that recaptured the Temple in Jerusalem from the ancient Greeks and used olive oil to rededicate the Temple's menorah. (As the story goes, the Maccabees found enough oil to light the menorah for only one night, but it miraculously lasted for eight.)

You won't find potato latkes on Hanukkah in Italy. Instead, in Tuscany, Hanukkah traditionally means pollo fritto-chicken pieces that are battered and fried in oil. Classic pollo fritto recipes tend to be quite simple and spare, consisting of little more than flour, egg, chicken, oil, and salt. But that crunchy canvas offers lots of opportunities to play around with flavor, like adding warm and smoky spices to the flour mixture and enlivening the beaten egg with lemon zest and juice.