European

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.

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.

The cookbook cited above includes several recipes for roast duck and sweet red cherries, the variety that grows in Alsace being Reverchon or Coeur de Pigeon (Pigeon’s Heart). I use Bing or Montmorency cherries, and you can also substitute peaches or rhubarb. If using rhubarb, just increase the amount of sugar to taste. I use cherries with pits, because they add more flavor, but remember to warn your guests!

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.

In the heart of Dijon, at the Municipal Museum, right next door to the majestic stone kitchen of the dukes of Burgundy, Alette Lévy checks coats. Once the owner of Dijon’s only kosher butcher shop, she talks food between customers, such as this chicken-tagine recipe she makes for her French friends. The trick to this recipe is to put the almonds in the microwave for 3 minutes, to make them crackly. This way you don’t run the risk of burning them, the way I always seem to do when I forget them in the oven or frying pan. Alette told me you can substitute lamb for the chicken.

When I was in Bordeaux, I received a call from Yaël Nahon, a young woman in public relations who loves to cook. We decided to meet at the Place des Quinconces, a beautiful square near the harbor with shimmering water where children play in the summer. In her spare time she is trying to re-create the dishes of her mother and grandmother, who came from Oran, in Algeria. Like many other North Africans, she uses spigol (an Algerian spice combination of hot pepper, saffron, and cumin, now packaged in Marseille) to enhance the flavor of her chicken dishes. This is a dish Yael ate every Friday night of her childhood. It was always preceded by several salads and followed by cookies and fruit.

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!

Sweetly glazed and flavored with preserved lemons, this chicken, a recipe from Irene Weil, brings a Moroccan flavor to a classic French roasted chicken. Recipes like this represent the new France, with its influences from all over the world. Irene, married to a Frenchman for more than thirty years, was born in the United States to parents who came from Vienna. Even though she raised her children in France, she still has an American sense of adventure in her cooking.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Raïto, also spelled Raite or Rayte, is a very old sauce, traditionally served by Provençal Jews on Friday night over cod, either simply grilled or baked. Some people add a small whole fresh or canned anchovy, a few sprigs of fennel, and/or about 1/4 cup of chopped walnuts or almonds. Similar in taste to a puttanesca sauce, it can also be served over grilled tuna or pasta.

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.

Chez Paul, located near the port of Marseille, stands at a crossroads with three other fish restaurants. But the license from the Beth Din of Marseille, hanging on the wall, certifying that the restaurant is kosher, sets this one apart. When I visited Chez Paul, Fathi Hmam, the Tunisian Muslim chef, was busy prepping bouillabaisse for the evening’s dinner. Technically, his bouillabaisse stew is a bourride, because it only has fish with fins and scales—those that swim near the magnificent rocky shore of this ancient port city of France. But he does not use lotte (monkfish), also a nonkosher fish, central to fish bourrides in Marseille. Bourride is one of the oldest dishes in France, said to have been brought by the Phoenicians in the sixth century B.C.E. Of course, the tomatoes and potatoes arrived much later. It is also said that a few Jews came with the Phoenicians on this voyage. Is that why, perhaps, there is no shellfish in the bourride? The success of this simple dish depends on knowing at what moment the fish is perfectly cooked. And, of course, don’t forget the rouille (see page 63), which North African Jews and Muslims alike make their own by adding a Tunisian touch: harissa.

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.

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.’ ”

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.

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.