Jewish

Harissa is available supermarkets all over the country, or you can make your own (see page 33).

Sometimes I discover dishes that are perfectly in accord with the laws of kashrut in unlikely places. Walking around a neighborhood market in Paris one day, I wandered into a small delicatessen shop called Partout et Tout Mieux, which translates as “Everywhere and Better.” An alluring cherry-tomato-and-basil tart sitting invitingly in the window caught my eye. So I went in and complimented Marie Le Bechennec, the shop owner, on the lovely-looking quiche. I explained that I was writing a cookbook on Jewish food in France and this crustless quiche would fit perfectly into a dairy meal. She replied that she and her husband, Serge, are from Brittany and have many Jewish customers. During the war, her father-in-law was taken prisoner by the Germans because he had hidden Jews who were being mistreated. She paused for a moment. “You know, I think my son is tolerant because he heard this strong voice growing up. That is the only way that tolerance will be translated from generation to generation.” Mary calls this dish a quiche clafoutis. In French cuisine, a quiche is a custard of eggs and milk or cream baked in a pastry crust. And clafoutis comes from the verb clafir, meaning “to fill up” or “puff up.” In this case, the bright-red tomatoes and green basil puff up to the top of the custard. I vary this dish by adding Parmesan and goat cheese; in winter try sautéed mushrooms or one package of frozen spinach and a handful of chives.

The ever-popular lardon-laced quiche Lorraine is off limits for Jews who eschew pork. In an effort to adapt the regional specialty to fit their dietary limitations, the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine created this onion tart, which I find delicious. I learned how to make it from the great chef André Soltner, who, before he came to America, worked for a kosher caterer in his native Alsace. Trust me, you won’t miss the bacon.

For Claude Lelouch and other French Jews from North Africa, couscous (a term that refers both to the stew and to the grain) is comfort food. When Suzon Meymy started cooking as a young bride living in Paris, her native Morocco seemed terribly far away, so she wrote to her mother, asking for recipes. “My mother was so unhappy that I was in France, so she sent me cooked chicken and flans. What she didn’t know was that they didn’t travel well, so we couldn’t eat them when they arrived.” When Suzon cooks lamb couscous today, in her small apartment in a Paris suburb, she uses her mother’s techniques. “My mother, who was the couscous-maker of Mogador, spent all her time in the kitchen,” she told me. “I watched her and my sisters cook for every festival in our town. They were exhausted from so much cooking. I saw them falling apart with fatigue.” Suzon, a very good cook, takes the time to make this lamb stew only when her whole family is present. What I like about this amazing recipe for couscous is that the vegetables are not overcooked. Serve the lamb with couscous (see page 270) and a delicious Moroccan squash dish (see page 302)

Michel Kalifa is one of the few butchers in France who go through the laborious process of removing the many veins in a leg of lamb, a process that is integral to koshering. Because of the difficulties in koshering a leg of lamb, most people will use the shoulder, which he loves as well. Glancing lovingly at his wife, he said, “A thigh of a woman is as nimble and light as a shoulder of lamb.” Here is an old Jewish Provençal recipe for a shoulder of lamb. Make it, as Michel Kalifa would, with a caress of garlic.

The oldest recipe for lamb I could find is for a shoulder of mutton or lamb—a membre de mouton à la judaïque—which comes from Pierre de Lune’s 1656 cookbook, Le Cuisinier, où Il Est Traité de la Véritable Méthode pour Apprester Toutes Sortes de Viandes . . . This recipe calls for lots of garlic and anchovies to be embedded in a shoulder of lamb with herbes de Provence. The pan juices are reduced with the juice of an orange and enhanced with white pepper and orange peel. The title of this recipe is one of the first known uses of “judaïque” (“Jewish style”) in a French recipe. Don’t forget that, “officially,” no Jews lived in France at this time. Here is my adaptation 350 years later.

For Women, cookbook are often memories of their mothers. Daisy Taïeb, the mother of two daughters, wrote Les Fêtes Juives à Tunis Racontées à Mes Filles (Jewish Holidays in Tunis as Told to My Daughters). “My daughters wanted to learn the religious customs in Tunis, like the fète des filles, a festival where the girls go to the synagogue all in white,” she told me. “Soon, with rapid Frenchification and assimilation, you will be able to learn about these traditions only in museums.” One day when I was in Nice, I watched Madame Taïeb cook her famous meatballs stuffed into vegetables. She was making them for Friday night dinner, to serve with couscous. Though I had expected a quiet, grandmotherly woman, I found her to be a trim, stylish lady who had taken the Dale Carnegie course on public speaking. She is the president of the French version of the Jewish Federation in Nice, and the representative of B’nai B’rith on the Côte d’Azur. These days, Madame Taïeb, who has lived alone since her husband’s death, invites people in for Sabbath dinner. “In Tunisia, you have the same foods as in Nice— fish, vegetables, spices— so it is not difficult to make the recipes,” she told me. “But you have to use your hands to judge, not your eyes, when making meatballs.” For Madame Taïeb, couscous with meatballs stuffed into peppers, artichoke bottoms, and eggplants, one of my favorite dishes, is symbolic of family, remembrance, and Friday night dinners.

This Veal dish is a big favorite of butcher Jacques Geismar’s Jewish clientele. You can substitute matzo for the bread at Passover, and, if you like, add raisins and apples to the stuffing. This dish is popular for the Sabbath or the high holidays in France, the way brisket or stuffed turkey is in America. Try the stuffing for your next turkey.

Jocelyne Akoun (see page 28) also served me meatballs with tomato sauce for Friday night dinner, a typical Sephardic dish for the eve of the Sabbath. I had found centuries-old recipes for these almondeguilles or albondigas, but without tomato sauce. For me, the post–Columbian Exchange marriage of tomatoes and meatballs greatly enhances the flavor of this dish!

Because the Jews were a source of income to the Popes of Avignon until the Revolution, they were squeezed whenever money was needed. A story goes that in Carpentras, the home of the largest number of Jews in the thirteenth century, a 1276 agreement forced the Jews to deliver to the bishop’s table a prized delicacy, the tender tongue of all the animals that they slaughtered in the kosher manner. The Jewish tradition of smoking or pickling tongue is a perfect example of my definition of a culinary lag—using pickled tongue even when refrigeration makes it no longer necessary, and at a time when we focus on eating fresh foods without preservatives. But because these are traditional family recipes, people are hesitant to tamper with them. After tasting fresh tongue at Le Mas Tourteron (see page 92) just outside Gordes, I have always opted for fresh, because of its amazing flavor and texture. Including garlic and saffron adds a North African touch to this dish, which is often served at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs in North Africa.

It is common knowledge that Jews should usher in the Sabbath with a little bit of fish. But in the village in Poland from which Danielle’s mother hailed, they often could not get carp in the winter, because the lake was frozen. The story goes that the Jews thought they could make an arrangement with God to create falshe fish (Yiddish for “fake fish”). So they made meat patties, shaped in ovals or balls, depending on the family tradition, and simmered them in a broth with salt, sugar, pepper, and a little carrot, so they would look and taste like sweet-and-sour gefilte fish. “Because the intentions were good, the benevolent God agreed with the Jews and said that he would make believe that it was fish,” said Danielle. (In this recipe, sugar is used as a seasoning, as it was in past centuries.)

In France, for Rosh Hashanah and Passover, tongue, with its velvety texture, is often served with a sweet-and-sour ginger sauce. In some homes the tongue is put on the table as a symbol of the wish for success in the New Year. Spicy-sweet sauces often accompanied pickled meats in Alsace, where sugar was first used as a condiment rather than as a dessert sweetener. By the time the meat had been pickled, desalted, and then cooked, it had lost much of its flavor, so sugar, ginger, and other spices ensured a good taste. Jews have a long history of treating tongue, an often scorned cut of meat, as a delicacy. It is preserved and pickled in a salt brine with garlic, pepper, spices, sodium nitrite, and sodium erythorbate. The tongue is then boiled, the skin peeled off, and slices of meat are served with a sauce.

“To be Jewish is to be conscious of what one says and what one does,” Jacqueline Meyer-Benichou, who cooks some of Paris’s most elegant kosher food, told me. The head of a real-estate company, with a degree from Les Beaux Arts in architecture, Jacqueline treats cooking as her avocation and considers the presentation of food to be as important as the menu. Living near branches of great gourmet stores in Paris, such as Lenôtre, she window-shops, looking at their food preparations and presentations, and tries to replicate the recipes for kosher dinners at her home. For dessert, she often fills little golden cups with soy-based iced soufflés, as Lenôtre does. “I love perfection,” she said. At Passover, Jacqueline makes beef cheeks or even veal shanks seasoned the Algerian way, with hot pepper and cilantro, and serves them as a main course, accompanied by her Algerian take on cabbage with cilantro and hot pepper. If you can’t find beef cheeks, use veal shanks, stew meat, or flanken—any slightly fatty cut will do. Slow cooking makes the meat tender and delicious. Since it tastes even better prepared a day in advance, reheat just before serving.

This typical Alsatian mustard sauce is served with pickled or smoked tongue or pickel-fleisch; it has been eaten with fresh and salted meat or fresh and dried fish for centuries by the northern Jewish communities in France.

Alsace is the only part of France with a tradition of France with a tradition of both pork and beef charcuterie. When I asked a butcher in Strasbourg about pickelfleisch (corned beef ) and pickled tongue, he paused to think a minute. Yes, he told me, both are eaten primarily by Jewish clientele. Of that charcuterie, pickelfleisch is the crown prince. Basically corned beef cured for eight to ten days with salt, sugar, spices, and saltpeter and then baked or boiled, it is more garlicky, with more varied spices, than that in America. Try making your own corned beef. It is great fun. Eat it as is or in a choucroute garni (sauerkraut dressed with meat and potatoes).

One-Dish Sabbath meals like choucroute and pot-au-feu are for Alsatians what cholent is for Jews from eastern Europe. In the nineteenth century, the author Alexandre Weill mentioned the Sabbath lunch meal of his childhood, which included a dish of pearl barley or beans, choucroute, and kugel, made with mostly dried pear or plum. Choucroute with sausage and corned beef is also eaten at Purim and has particular significance. The way the sausage “hangs” in Alsatian butcher shops is a reminder of how the evil Haman, who wanted to kill all the Jews, was hanged. Sometimes Alsatians call the fat hunk of corned or smoked beef “the Haman.” Michèle Weil, a doctor in Strasbourg, makes sauerkraut on Friday, lets it cool, and just reheats it for Saturday lunch. She varies her meal by adding pickelfleisch, duck confit, chicken or veal sausages, and sometimes smoked goose breast. You can make this dish as I have suggested, or vary the amounts and kinds of meats. Choucroute is a great winter party dish; the French will often eat it while watching rugby games on television. When you include the corned beef, you can most certainly feed a whole crowd.

One Friday morning when I arrived at Philippe and Caroline’s home, the family was in full Shabbat swing. Four of Caroline’s nine children were nearby to help with preparations for the Sabbath. Caroline was assembling ingredients for cholent, based on a recipe that came with her family from Poland. Caroline makes cholent each week, cooking it all night in a slow cooker and serving it at lunch on Saturday. She simmers the meat in red wine, adds some barley and sometimes bulgur, and uses vegetable oil instead of the traditional chicken shmaltz.

In Southern Morocco, this Sabbath stew was cooked first over a wood fire and then kept warm in a pot tucked under the hot sand. In Spain and northern Morocco, it was cooked in communal ovens in the Jewish quarter of cities. Called by the Jewish youth of France today “daf marocaine,” this flavorful stew, also known as skeena—meaning “hot” in northern Morocco—is preferred by many young people to ordinary cholent (see page 213) for Sabbath lunch. Today in France the meat is usually beef rather than the lamb or mutton more commonly used in North Africa. For this one-pot meal, the rice and/or wheat berries or white beans must be kept apart for cooking, so that they can be served separately. Carène Moos encloses the seasoned rice and wheat berries in pieces of gauze or cheesecloth, knotting the cloth to make two individual bundles.

Rashi teachers us a great deal about cooking in the eleventh century. In the Talmud a rabbi “told his attendant: roast a goose for me, and be careful of burning it.” Rashi explains that “they would roast geese in their small ovens which opened on top. The food would be suspended from the opening, which would then be sealed until the food was roasted.” One hundred fifty years ago, goose was the meat par excellence in the Jewish communities of Alsace- Lorraine and southern Germany. In my grandmother’s notes in German on roast goose, she includes a recipe for “hurt goose,” meaning goose roasted without its outer skin and the fat underneath, which of course was used to render the fat and to make gribenes, crispy rinds, my grandfather’s favorite treat. They also carefully separated the skin from the long neck, stuffed it with meat, onions, flour, and spices, and cooked it as a Sabbath delicacy. Ariane Daguin, head of D’Artagnan Foods, had me try this crispy recipe from her mother, a French- Polish Jew. To make the goose less fatty, Ariane cooks it very slowly, leaves it overnight in the kitchen so that the fat can jell, then roasts it in a hot oven to crisp the skin, the absolutely most delicious part of the goose.

When I was in Paris, I got in touch with Anita Hausser, Jacqueline’s daughter. We met at a café in Paris to chat. The conversation turned into lunch, then finally extended into a dinner on another occasion in her charming and very French apartment, near the Maison de la Radio in Auteuil. For dinner, the first course was Alsatian goose liver spread on grilled bread, accompanied by champagne. Sometimes, she told me, she slathers the marrow from the cooked bones on the toast instead, sprinkling it with coarse salt. At the dinner we ate as a first course the broth from the pot-au-feu with tiny knepfle (matzo balls), to the delight of her very assimilated French Jewish guests. A century or so ago, in small villages of Alsace, the pot-au-feu cauldron of vegetables and meat would hang on a hook in the chimney to simmer slowly all night. I imagine religious Jews placing it there before the Sabbath began, and going to sleep with the tantalizing aromas of meat and vegetables as the fire slowly turned to embers and died out, leaving the pot still warm. When Anita makes her pot-au-feu, she cooks the meat slowly with the vegetables, which she discards toward the end. She then adds fresh carrots, leeks, and turnips, cut in chunks, for the last 30 minutes of cooking. She always accompanies her pot-au-feu with horseradish, mustard, and gherkins. This slowcooked dish is traditionally made in Jewish homes for Rosh Hashanah and the Sabbath.