European

This is one of my favorite winter Alsatian vegetable combinations, and a common winter vegetable dish of French Jews. It is best made a day in advance and left to meld the flavors. Serve as an accompaniment to roast goose, chicken, or duck.

Like Michel Goldberg, Natan Holchaker was a little boy during the Nazi occupation. When the war started, his father moved to a small village in the Dordogne with a little garden and a well. One day his father told him to “disappear,” and he and his brother left to live with peasants in the countryside. Two days later, the Germans attacked. Throughout the war, he and his brother lived on farms, helping to pick crops and learning how to find porcini mushrooms, which they gathered for the farmers. This delicious recipe comes from Natan and his wife, Josiane Torrès-Holchaker. Josiane’s ancestors came to Bordeaux from Portugal in the sixteenth century. Although they lived outwardly as Marranos, or New Christians, the Torrès-Vedras family continued to live as Jews at home. In 1790, the National Assembly decreed that all the Portuguese and Spanish Jews in France would enjoy the rights of active citizens. As we were driving with Natan and Josiane toward the Médoc wine country in Bordeaux, they suddenly stopped the car, jumped out, and looked at the cèpes (porcini mushrooms) that were being sold by the road. They were so excited, as only the French can be, in anticipation of cooking the mushrooms. “See how fresh these are,” said Josiane. “They are shiny and white, the cap is closed, and they aren’t green inside, a sign of their being too old.” She told me that sometimes she just serves the mushrooms raw, dicing and marinating them first in lemon juice. Then she described the way her mother prepared porcini.

Visiting the marketplace of Carpentras, near Avignon, we almost missed the synagogue, the oldest still-functioning one in France, dating back to 1367 and renovated in the eighteenth century. The façade, like that of all synagogues in France, was nondescript, whereas inside it was a jewel box of eighteenth-century Greek Corinthian columns, and all around, the interior was decorated in rose, green, blue, and yellow. As in the synagogue in nearby Cavaillon, the rabbi’s pulpit was perched upstairs, above the congregants. “In 1358, the provincial town of Carpentras was known as La Petite Jérusalem,” Jennie Lévy told us during a tour. “A yellow cloth on their coats and on the women’s bonnets indicated that they were Jewish.” Today about eighty Jewish families live in Carpentras and the surrounding area, most of them emigrants from Morocco. Madame Lévy, who came from Safi, Morocco, in 1964, showed me the basement, which has a mikveh (ritual bath), fed by a natural spring, and an oven used for baking Sabbath bread, as well as another for matzo. As I listened to Madame Lévy’s eloquent history of this French synagogue, I was aware again of how Sephardic Jews are rekindling Jewish life in France. Since it was on Friday when we visited, Madame Lévy was anxious to go home to prepare her Sabbath dinner of vegetable soup, meatballs, and sautéed red peppers and haricots verts, the thin French green beans that are so absolutely delicious.

When I was in the southwest of France in mid-October, the farmers’ markets had an abundance of large dried white beans. These lima beans, which came to Spain from the New World, have now become an integral part of the Old World’s cuisine. Before the discovery of the Americas, only fava beans, chickpeas, and lentils were to be had. My cousin Richard Moos’s wife, Hélène, cooked her white beans with carrots in goose fat rather than lard. The day before, I had eaten the same combination in a soup at a farm nearby. Either way, this is a great fall dish.

The French are crazy about seasonal vegetables, and particularly, I am happy to say, about fennel. A flavoring that is mentioned in the Mishnah around 200 C.E., fennel is used in both sweet and savory preparations. This particular dish was served as an accompaniment to fish with beurre-blanc sauce at a Bat Mitzvah that I attended in Geneva. I especially like its intense, sharp flavor.

In the movie Ratatouille, the rat made a tian of eggplant and other vegetables, set vertically in a baking dish. A similar dish came down in the family of Gérard Monteux, whose ancestors have made this dish since tomatoes came to Provence. The keys to the recipe are to make sure that the tomatoes and onions are of the same diameter as the eggplant, and to use a square or rectangular baking dish. I have made it in a French tian, but you can use any pan about 9 inches square. Good any time of year, it is spectacular in the summer, when tomatoes are at their best.

I tasted this simple bleeding of two green vegetables at Irene Weil’s home in Nice (see page 170). Always a big hit, it is colorful, delicious, and a perfect vegetable dish, particularly for Passover. “You can make this dish with fresh peas, green asparagus tips, fava beans—the list is endless,” said Irene.

This delicious cauliflower dish comes from Michelle Cahen Bamberger, whose family had lived in Lorraine since “forever,” as she told me, until World War II brought her to the south of France, where she was forced into hiding. Madame Bamberger says that she feels and cooks French. And she feels French first and Jewish second, despite all that she went through during the war. “One day, I was going home with a bottle of wine under my arm to the place we were hiding in Lyon during the war,” she told me in the parlor of the apartment in Toulon where she and her husband now live. “I saw the Gestapo coming, so, instead of going into the house, I kept walking and saved myself. When we were in hiding, our life wasn’t bad compared with others. Because my parents were in the clothing industry, we traded fabric for butter and rabbits. I remember one day we received a lamb roast. That was really something.” Her cauliflower dish, with its crunchy golden exterior, is similar to ones I have tasted in Israel and elsewhere.

When I was visiting the Luberon, we wound our way up to the top of the hillop village of Bonnieux and stopped at the Musée de la Boulangerie. There, in an ancient house, the history of bread and baking is traced. Among the ancient pots and pans were shallow unglazed earthenware bowls called at the museum “tians,” which were and are used much like Dutch ovens for cooking vegetables in the embers of a fire. In the south of France, there are many recipes for tians, layered casseroles of vegetables sometimes mixed with eggs and sometimes with rice and served in the Jewish way as a main course for a dairy meal. In this recipe, a nice substitute for the spinach would be Swiss chard, also a vegetable used since antiquity.

Like many French Jews today, Jocelyne Akoun (see page 28) is a cultural amalgam. She grew up in a Turkish-Spanish family that lived in Algeria for many years before immigrating to Marseille. This dish could as easily be Provençal as Algerian, the tomatoes having been added when they came to the Old World with the discovery of the Americas.

Eggplant came to Europe from India sometime around the eighth century, possibly with seeds carried by Jewish merchants. Often called the Jew’s apple, the eggplant has played an important role in Jewish cooking since early times. The old recipes found in the Vaucluse, such as the Ladino almodrote de berenjenas, are present today throughout the Sephardic world in the Mediterranean. Although the eggplant is sometimes sautéed in this dish, I prefer roasting it over a fire to bring out the smoky flavor, and then chopping it into chunks with two knives, a technique I learned from Sephardic French cooks. You can also roast the eggplant in an oven then pulse it in the food processor. With the increasing number of vegetarians even in France, this dish is becoming very popular, “modernized” with pesto, crème fraîche, or anchovies, or covered with tomato sauce. A purist, I like to serve it the old way—simply, with a salad.

Gerard Monteux, who is a descendant of the Juifs du Pape, told me that this was a very famous dish from Carpentras, eaten at Purim. (It is also a Lenten dish.) In this town, which had an oven in the Jewish quarter, cooks prepared the dish at home, putting it in an earthenware tian. They then brought it to the public oven and baked it, fetching it when it was done. Our modern-day casserole dishes have evolved from this tradition.

The secret of Hélène’s ratatouille is to cook the vegetables separately in the oven, intensifying their individual flavors. This may seem like using a lot of pans, but it is mostly waiting time. She assured me, “You can just let vegetables cook themselves and gently stir them all together.” The word “ratatouille” is related to the word touiller and the Latin tudiculare, meaning “to stir,” “crush,” or “toss.” After being cooked, the vegetables were originally assembled in a rectangular earthenware tian casserole, then gratinéed, and served hot or cold on the Sabbath. Now the cooked eggplant, pepper, zucchini, and tomato may be served together, or separately as individual salads. Ratatouille is similar to the Middle Eastern and North African dish tchoukchouka (see page 94), meaning “to shake up,” in both Hebrew and Arabic, and to other very old Mediterranean dishes of zucchini and eggplant. Hélène seasons her version with a hot but not fiery Basque pepper called piment d’Espelette, from Espelette, a town near her native Toulouse. If you don’t have piment d’Espelette, you can use hot paprika or New Mexico red chili powder.

Nothing tastes so good to me as the intense flavor of a fresh tomato, picked at the height of summer, cooked down and seasoned with fresh parsley, garlic, and olive oil. This recipe exemplifies southern-French vegetable cooking at its best. I have served these tomatoes as an accompaniment to roast lamb (see page 234) or, in the summer, as a scrumptious first course. They are also great with lox, bagels, and cream cheese to break the fast of Yom Kippur.

This risotto recipe from Natan Holchaker, a retired dentist and food hobbyist in Bordeaux, includes smoked goose breast. If you cannot find a kosher version, substitute smoked turkey breast.

When Violette Corcos Abulafia Tapieri Budestchu makes this spice-scented lentil dish, its subtle flavors bring back memories of the Morocco of her childhood. Now, when her grandchildren or great-grandchildren prepare it, it smells like afternoons and evenings they spent when they were growing up, visiting her in her apartments in Jerusalem or near Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. Born in Mogador, Madame “Granny” Budestchu, a fabulous cook, is descended from Kabbalists, prominent merchants, and royal counselors to the sultans and kings of Morocco. Her recipes, traveling from country to country, like the path of the Jews, can be traced back at least to twelfth-century Spain. When she makes this dish, she grinds each spice separately with the mortar and pestle that she brought with her to Paris in the 1940s, enlivening the spices with the fresh tastes of mint and cilantro leaves.

This old Alsatian dish of rice and fruit sautéed in veal fat is typical of so many simple, seasonal recipes. It is adapted from La Cuisine Juive en Alsace by Freddy Raphaël. The dried fruit, mixed with an onion and sautéed in a little veal fat with prunes and raisins, transforms the rice into a magnificent dish. I have substituted vegetable oil for the suggested veal fat, and I usually serve this rice dish alongside a meat dish.

If Jewish-Arab relations are better in Marseille than in any other city in France, it is in part due to people like Martine Yana. A Moroccan-born Jewish sociologist married to a Tunisian, she is the head of the Centre Culturel Juif (Jewish Cultural Center), near the Grande Synagogue in downtown Marseille. When La Radio de la Communauté Juive (Radio of the Jewish Community) went on the air in 1981, Martine hosted a weekly talk show in which she invited Jews to chat about their culinary customs. “We followed people’s holiday traditions in Tétouan, Salonika, Turkey, and Marseille,” she told me in her office. “And we got their stories.” This was the period when people were beginning to open up about their experiences in World War II and their Jewishness in general. Like many other French people, Martine thinks philosophically about food. She asks the guests on her programs why they eat certain foods and about the symbolism surrounding them. “I was surprised that so many people didn’t see the greater meaning in what they were doing,” she told me. As head of the cultural center, she has taken it upon herself to present Jewish traditions in France proudly to the outside world. When the mayor of the city of Marseille chose to feature the country of Algeria at a city exhibition, for example, she made sure that there was a Jewish presence and set up a pavilion featuring traditional handmade costumes and cuisine. Last year, during the annual Ramadan festival in Marseille, she suggested to the head of the Arab Cultural Center that there be a Jewish booth. He agreed, and her team of assistants joined her in organizing Hanukkah games for the children and distributing pamphlets on Jewish religion and customs. To their surprise, the curiosity about Judaism made the booth a huge success. Clearly, the time was right. In her cookbook, Trésors de la Table Juive, Martine gathers stories and recipes that cover the breadth of Judaism in France. She includes dishes like this old Provençal spinach-and-herb omelet. The omelet, often served cold, is similar to the North African omelets called m’hemmer, flavored sometimes with chicken and calves’ brains, sometimes with vegetables. Today they are mostly eaten cut into small squares as an hors d’oeuvre on special occasions, such as weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. I love this rendition, with its bright-green color, served hot or cold as an appetizer, or as a main dish for brunch. Use the recipe as a guide, and vary the greens and herbs seasonally, according to your whim.

Agar Lippmann, age eighty-two, is a living encyclopedia of Alsatian Jewish food. Born Agar Lippmann in a little town near Colmar, and raised in Bollwiller, she married another Lippmann (no kin) and moved to Lyon during World War II. When her son Henri opened a kosher catering company there almost thirty years ago, she started out helping in the kitchen, and has been helping him ever since. Now, using local chefs—some Jewish and some not—the two cater kosher events all over Lyon and as far away as Besançon, bringing their kosher pots and pans and sometimes portable ovens. For Passover they take over a hotel in nearby Aix-les-Bains, where French Jews can have their Seder while enjoying the baths. Today most of the Lippmanns’ cooking is North African and modern French. Only for the holidays do they make traditional Alsatian and Ashkenazic food for their clients. “At holidays, people come back to their roots,” she told me in her catering office, just steps away from the Grande Synagogue. Recipes like this savory matzo kugel predate noodle kugels in general, and certainly the noodle kugels we eat in America today. Although the original recipe called for veal fat, I substitute melted butter or vegetable oil.

People often ask me what kind of latkes were eaten before potatoes came to the Old World from the New. This onion pancake gives us a taste of that past. Buckwheat, called farine aux Sarrazins or blé noir in French, is used for this recipe. Although rendered goose fat was traditionally the oil used in Alsace and elsewhere in Europe, oils made from safflower, walnuts, and other nuts and seeds were also used, probably pressed by the farmers who brought them to markets where they were sold. The recipe, although attributed as Alsatian in one cookbook, is clearly from eastern Europe, as the word “gretchenes” means buckwheat in Polish.