Flaming Tea: The Wildest Hanukkah Tradition

You know about latkes (even, if you’ve been keeping up with Poppy and Prune, obscure varieties like chestnut and brain). You know about sufganiyot and its predecessors, from awwame to zvingous. But have you ever heard of the flaming tea ceremony?

No? Me either, until a few years ago when I was leafing through Phyllis and Miriam Glazer’s The Essential Book of Jewish Festival Cooking and learned about this wild Russian Hanukkah tradition: basically, at the end of Hanukkah dinner, everyone gets a lump of sugar (broken off from a giant sugar cone—much cooler than your average sugar cube), dips it in brandy (slivovitz, I presume), lights the boozy cube on fire, and drops it into a glass of hot tea, freshly poured from a samovar.

This was not a tradition in my family (although my great-grandmother Esther drank tea out of little glasses, sipped through a sugar cube held between her teeth in good Eastern European fashion—even in the middle of EastLA), but it sounded pretty cool, so naturally I had to try it.

At this juncture, I must admit that my own flaming tea experience did not quite go to plan. Lacking stores of the traditional brandy, I figured I could just as easily sub some other high-proof alcohol—say, vodka.

I couldn’t source a sugar cone or a samovar either, and I wasn’t able to capture all of the drama of the event as described in the literature—according to all sources I consulted, it was the thing to shut off all the lights before simultaneously igniting all sugar cubes for one grand drop into the tea. I didn’t feel confident enough in my skills to attempt this in the dark, and lacking a party of willing participants, opted to do just a single cup of flaming tea. And I approached it more like a scientist in a lab and less like a reveller at a party.

So I soaked my sugar cube in vodka, plopped it in a little metal spoon that I balanced across my teacup (which originally belonged to great-grandmother Esther), and, with a little help from my able assistant (Hi mom!), was ready to get down to business.

There was only one problem: that little cube did not want to light. I’d light a match, hold it against the sugar, and wait… and wait… and wait… And eventually the flame would fizzle out, the sugar cube untouched.

Many attempts, three sugar cubes, and a brief experiment with whiskey later, a very small Hanukkah miracle occurred and the sugar cube (kinda sorta) caught a faint, but distinct, glow. Not wanting to chance it going out, I opted to drop it into the (by now cold) tea stat. Sadly, I didn’t get enough of a conflagration going to get the kind of dramatic drop I was anticipating—rather, it was a very undramatic plop. And “flaming” is not really an accurate descriptor of any stage of this activity. But still, it was an interesting experience—and maybe next year I’ll pony up for some slivovitz and give it another try.

How did it taste? That’s really secondary to the spectacle, to be frank. But the answer, if you are curious, is not good. Granted, I used vodka rather than brandy, but I can’t imagine it would’ve been much better with another type of alcohol. I just don’t think boozy sugary tea is my thing—but hey, maybe it’s yours!

Sources: The Essential Book of Jewish Festival Cooking (Phyllis Glazer with Miriam Glazer, 2004); “Reviving the Flaming Tea Ceremony,” the Forward (Miriam Leberstein, November 26, 2004); A Taste of Russia: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality (DarraGoldstein, 1985)