Jewish

Like many other communities in France, the town of Annecy had few Jews living there until the late 1950s. Then, one day, the town’s mayor assembled the Catholic archbishop, the head of the Protestants, and the leader of the tiny Jewish community, who happened to be my relative Rudi Moos (see page 3), and asked them to welcome emigrants from North Africa. Rudi sponsored about forty Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian Jewish families and built a synagogue in this town that had none. Cécile Zana and her husband were one of these families. They left Tunisia and went first to the Congo, and then, in 1968, to Annecy, where they live today. And, perhaps not surprisingly in this small Jewish world, Cécile’s daughter married Rudi’s grandson. Cécile showed me how to make this delicious spring dish with lots of parsley and peas.

Fava beans and chickpeas were brought to France in the thirteenth century with the opening of trade routes by the Crusaders. Before white beans came from the New World, the French used fava beans for cassoulet and called it févolade. Cassoulet could well be a variation of the overnight Sabbath stews such as dafina or hamim, which means “warm.” Cassoulet could also have come from the Arabs, who made a similar dish, skeena. All I know is that, in a land where there is lots of pork, in a land where the Jews played a role in developing the art of fattening goose livers, cassoulet looks suspiciously like the ubiquitous Sabbath stews, and often has no pork in it at all. This cassoulet calls for lamb shoulder and a great deal of duck or goose fat instead in which to cook the duck legs and sausage and lamb (it is not all consumed). You can use vegetable oil, but it will not taste the same. E-mail Aaronsfood@aol.com for a place to obtain rendered kosher duck fat, or roast a duck and make your own.

This Jewish-style stewed chicken comes from Gastronomie Pratique, a cookbook published in 1907 by Ali-Bab. Born Henri Babinski to Polish Christian immigrants to France, he was by profession a mining engineer, but he loved to cook and travel. Using the pseudonym Ali-Bab, he wrote the book for fun and included a long description of kosher cuisine as well as two Jewish recipes, one for choucroute, and one for poulet à la juive. Basically, he’s making a pot-au-feu, substituting chicken for beef and using fresh rendered chicken fat or veal-kidney suet. Since he finishes the dish off with butter, a no-no in kosher cooking, I have omitted this step. When serving this, I sometimes remove the skin and bones from the chicken for a more refined dish. I pile the chicken over white rice and spoon the gravy on top. Others, who like the meat on the bone, serve it as is. Sometimes called poule au bouillon or poule au pot, it is a comfort dish, and one often served in France for Friday night dinner or for the meal before the fast of Yom Kippur.

After a recent trip to France, I told chef Daniel Boulud that I wanted to learn more about charcuterie. He suggested that I spend a day with Sylvain Gasdon, the charcutier at his newly opened Bar Boulud in New York. It turned out that some of the trends I had been noticing in French restaurants were the foundation of the menu at Bar Boulud, featuring charcuterie and lighter terrines. I asked Sylvain, who came from Paris to help Daniel, if he would teach me how to make a terrine, one for those who eschew pork. This is it!

This is one of the down-to-earth recipes Baroness Rothschild loves. When I made the dish for a friend, he said that, like stuffed cabbage, this Bohemian chicken recipe tasted better on the second day. Holding it only enhances the flavor, making it a perfect dish for Shabbat.

Chicken flavored with fennel and garlic is a very Jewish Friday night dish, one eaten by Rashi and his family in the eleventh century. I have found recipes for it in many historical cookbooks, but the inspiration for this version was a particularly tasty one from the late Richard Olney, who lived in Provence. There is something very comforting about the long-simmered fennel and garlic topped by the sautéed chicken.

While her husband was on a fall Sunday ramble with friends, Anne-Juliette Belicha gave me a cooking lesson in their fifteenth-century house overlooking the fields in the Dordogne countryside. The house is located on the outskirts of Montagnac, right near the caves of Lascaux, renowned for their prehistoric animal paintings. In the kitchen hang photos of the woman who owned the house at the turn of the century, who tended geese for foie gras and to provide goose fat for the winter. Because quinces were in season, Anne-Juliette decided to cook us one of her Algerian husband’s beloved Rosh Hashanah dishes, from a book that is also one of my favorites—150 Recettes et Mille et Un Souvenirs d’une Juive d’Algerie by Léone Jaffin. The quince, believed to be the Biblical “apple” of the Garden of Eden by some scholars, is a complex fruit. Hard to peel and quarter, quinces require careful handling. Once peeled, they darken rather quickly, so you need to keep them in water mixed with a little lemon juice. Anne-Juliette picked the quinces from a friend’s tree and used an old variety of onions—a cross between onions and shallots—that she bought at a nearby farmers’ market. As she cooked, first frying the onions and then the kosher chickens that she buys in Paris, she told us about her dream: to open a kosher bed-and-breakfast in the Dordogne.

Sandrine Weil and Mathias Laurent represent to me how France has changed in a generation. Their apartment at the time, overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, was very modern, very relaxed. With three young girls, they didn’t care if everything was in order, and the place had a wonderful warm feeling of welcoming chaos. On one special Shabbat, Mathias was the cook, and gave me a present of a meal with truffles. After the blessings were recited over the wine and the challah, made by Sandrine and her daughters, we tasted scrambled eggs with truffles as a first course, followed by an extraordinary dish of chicken with truffles stuffed under the skin, called in French poularde demi-deuil (chicken in half-mourning), and truffled gelato for dessert. Here is Mathias’s recipe for roast chicken. Since truffles are rare and expensive, I often instead scatter around the chicken some carrots, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, green beans, or whatever is seasonally available. It is delicious, and a snap to prepare. If you are lucky enough to have a truffle, however, omit the rosemary, thyme, and preserved lemon the night before, and carefully slide a small, sharp knife under the skin of the chicken, separating the skin from the meat. Then cut the truffle into six to eight thin slices and slide them under the skin. Leave in the refrigerator overnight. Continue with the roasting as I describe below.

This delightful jewish recipe adapted from one by the famous Provençal food writer Jean-Noël Escudier in his La Véritable Cuisine Provençale et Niçoise uses matzo meal to coat the trout, which is stuffed with spinach and sorrel, or, if you like, Swiss chard. Trout was and still is found in ponds on private property in Provence and throughout France. This particular recipe is served at Passover by the Jews of Provence.

Typically prepared at passover by French Moroccan Jews, this is one of the most colorful and delicious fish dishes I have ever tasted. Today most French Jews buy their fava beans, a sign of spring, twice peeled and frozen, from Picard Surgelés. Frozen is easier, but in this dish, fresh tastes even better.

This dish comes from Susie Morgenstern, the Judy Blume of France. When she is not writing novels for teenagers or lecturing around France, she is cooking in her marvelous nineteenth-century house, high up in the hills above Nice, overlooking the Mediterranean. When I visited her, she told me I’d need to climb a hundred steps to reach her home. I did, only to find that they were the wrong hundred stairs! So down I went, and up again. But the two climbs were worth it, and I was rewarded with a spectacular view from the house. Although Susie, who greeted me warmly, does not consider herself a good cook, she is known for her Passover Seders, always welcoming people from Nice’s diverse cultures. She learned this Turkish Jewish dish, which marries sautéed parsley with mackerel, from her motherin-law, who came to France from Constantinople. Susie calls it “Red Sea” mackerel because of the red color of the dish. Served at Passover, it evokes the story of the Jews crossing the Red Sea during their exodus from Egypt. When I suggested adding garlic to the dish, Susie paused. “My mother-in-law was no garlic miser, but she didn’t put it in this; there must have been a reason.” This confirms my belief that traditional foods, handed down from generation to generation, are the last to change within a culture.

One morning, as my editor, Judith Jones, and I were wandering around the streets of Strasbourg looking for a cell-phone store, I bumped into three young men having a smoke outside a restaurant. I saw “Crocodile” written on their chefs’ jackets and asked if Emil Jung, the chef-owner and a friend of a friend, was in the restaurant. They said he was and told me just to go knock on the door to say hello. We did; three hours later, we left the restaurant having been wined and dined beautifully by him and his lovely wife, Monique. One of their Alsatian specialties is fish choucroute (sauerkraut) with heavenly beurre-blanc sauce, a dish appreciated by customers who follow the laws of kashrut. In Strasbourg, where everybody eats sauerkraut, there is even a Choucrouterie theater and restaurant built on an old sauerkraut factory. Roger Siffert, the affable director of this bilingual (Alsatian dialect and French) cabaret theater, says that they serve seven varieties of choucroute, including fish for observant Jews. “With words like pickelfleisch and shmatteh existing in both Yiddish and Alsatian,” said Siffert, “people should reach out to what is similar, not separate. In Alsace we call Jews ‘our Jews.’ ”

In her modern kitchen, with its sleek mauve cabinets and red-and-purple tiles, Annie Berrebi showed me how to make this landmark dish. The stew can be prepped in advance and finished with a few minutes of simmering. Annie often freezes leftover grains of cooked couscous and then pops them into the microwave before using. Unlike Moroccan Jews, who serve their food in courses as the French do, the Berrebis serve everything at once (couscous, salads, and hot sauce). During this absolutely delicious meal, Annie told me, “I miss the sun in Tunis. But I love Paris. We have made our lives here.” You can either serve the couscous, fish balls, and vegetables on different plates, as Mrs. Berrebi does, or, if you want to make a big splash, as I like to do when presenting such a grand dish, pile the couscous in a pyramid on a big serving platter, then arrange the fish balls and the vegetables around it. Ladle the broth all over, and garnish with the cilantro. Pour some extra harissa into a little bowl, and put that on the table alongside cooked salads such as carrot salad (see page 112) or a tomato salad.

The slight tartness of sorrel and the richness of salmon are two flavors that Jews have always loved in their cooking. Eastern European Jews eat cold sorrel soup, which they call tchav; Greek Jews eat a tart rhubarb-and-spinach sauce over fish, and French Jews are drawn to Pierre Troisgros’s now classic salmon with sorrel sauce. Pierre told me that this seminal, simple, and delicious recipe came about because he had grown an abundance of sorrel and had to do something with it. With its subtle interplay of tartness and creaminess, this dish is sometimes made with kosher white wine and vermouth for Jewish weddings held at the restaurant.

One of the earliest printed recipes for stuffed fish was in a volume entitled Le Cuisinier Royal et Bourgeois by François Massialot, published in Paris in 1691. The author suggested that the fish be cleaned and the skin filled with the chopped flesh of carp, along with chopped mushrooms, perch, and the nonkosher eel. The skin of the stuffed carp was stitched or tied together, and the fish was then left to cook in an oven in a sauce of brown butter, white wine, and clear broth; it was served with mushrooms, capers, and slices of lemon. In Alsace today there is still a special stuffed fish cooked in white wine, carpe farcie à l’alsacienne, which is similar. But by and large, gefilte fish came to France with the waves of emigrants from eastern Europe. Sarah Wojakowski’s Parisian version of gefilte fish from Poland uses pike, haddock, cod, whiting, sole, and carp, and sautéed onions. Although she makes her gefilte fish into balls, she also stuffs some of the chopped-fish mixture into the head of the fish and encloses more of it in the skin. I have divided Sarah’s recipe in half, but the amounts might still be too big for you. If so, just divide them again. I have a big Seder and always give some gefilte fish away.

Every year at passover, I make too much gefilte fish. In fact, when I made gefilte fish one year with Jackie Lyden on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, I used 27 pounds of fish! Hadassa Schneerson Carlebach, a fascinating woman (see page 140) who worked with her late father making and providing matzo and other kosher food for observant Jews in detention camps in France, gave me this recipe for gefilte-fish-stuffed cabbage. Flavored with slowly cooked peppers and tomatoes, it is a great way to use up leftover patties. Even avowed gefilte-fish detesters love this dish. A cooking tip: I put the cabbage in the freezer for two days, defrost it for a day, and then use the limp leaves to wrap the fish.

According to the Talmud and the French sage Rashi, beets, fish, and cloves of garlic are essential foods to honor the Sabbath. French Jews also use horseradish, sliced as a root or ground into a sauce, and served at Passover to symbolize the bitterness of slavery. It was probably in Alsace or southern Germany that the horseradish root replaced the bitter greens of more southerly climes as the bitter herbs at Passover dinner. For hundreds of years, local farmers would dig up horseradish roots and peel and grate them outdoors, by their kitchens, making sure to protect their eyes from the sting. Then they would mix the root with a little sugar and vinegar and sometimes grated beets, keeping it for their own personal use or selling it at local farmers’ markets. In 1956, Raifalsa, an Alsace-based company, began grating horseradish grown by the area’s farmers in the corner of a farm in Mietesheim, near the Vosges Mountains. A few years ago, Raifalsa, still the only manufacturer of prepared horseradish in France, agreed to produce a batch of kosher horseradish. They had the rabbi of Strasbourg come to the factory to supervise the operation, which resulted in the production of six thousand 7-ounce pots, all stamped with a certification from the Grand Rabbinat de Strasbourg. Before grating the horseradish, just remember to open a window and put on a pair of goggles.

Carp, originally from China, were unknown west of the Rhine until the middle decades of the thirteeth century, when the French started farming fish in ponds. They used holding tanks for live storage in a world without refrigeration or canning methods and in areas that had no access to the sea. Said to have been brought to France by Jews, carp became the most popular fish in Europe during the Middle Ages, and the Sabbath fish par excellence for the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, in eastern France. Carpe à la juive, or “carp in the Jewish style,” as described above in C. Asserolette’s charming “letters” to a friend in which she recounted watching the preparations for a Rosh Hashanah dinner in an Alsatian home in Paris, is poached in advance and served cold. The evolution of the sauces used for this weekly fish reflects the culinary and cultural continuity of the Jewish people. In medieval France and southern Germany two sauces were very popular: the sweet-and-sour sauce (see preceding recipe) and this green parsley sauce, still used today in many homes at Passover. The green sauce is a simple one, often made with ginger, parsley, bread crumbs, and vinegar. Today few people in France except Jews use carp, since there are so many more poissons nobles (noble fish), as one Frenchman told me. Whatever fish you choose—carp, grouper, salmon, sea bream, pike, or cod—you can, for ease of preparation, use fillets or slice the fish into steaks, cook them on a bed of sautéed onions, then poach them in water and wine. When they are done, you may reduce the cooking liquid and pour it over the fish slices, arranged on a platter to resemble the whole fish, and serve the dish cold or at room temperature.

As a sign of spring, this salmon dish, made with the first peas of the season, has been handed down from generation to generation since the first Jews left Spain during the Inquisition. I tasted it in Biarritz, at the lovely villa of Nicole Rousso, who comes from a Portuguese merchant family from Bayonne.

Most Jews in France prior to the twentieth century used handwritten cookbooks passed down from mother to daughter. And since Alsace-Lorraine was under German occupation between 1871 and 1918, the majority of the Jews living there read German, using many of the dozen or so kosher cookbooks published in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Combing through these German books and her mother’s handwritten cookbook, Agar Lippmann, a caterer in Lyon, came across a recipe she had been trying to track down for years. Hutzel wecken, which literally means hat- or dome-shaped little rolls in German, is a very old Hanukkah and To B’Shevat (the new year of trees) fruitcake rarely made today. I prefer it treated more as bread, sliced very thin and served with cheese or really good butter. My guess is that the peanuts were a later addition. If you don’t have all the different dried fruits and nuts, just use what you have. The recipe is very flexible. Once, when I made it for a party, some of the guests liked it so much that, unbeknownst to me, they took home little slices hidden in paper napkins for their breakfast!