European

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.

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.

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.

Heinrich Heine, the Author of the above poem (which is often sung to the tune of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”), wrote in a letter that he especially liked “the carp in brown raisin sauce which my aunt prepared on Friday evenings to usher in the Sabbath.” Ernest Auricoste de Lazarque, the famous nineteenth-century folklorist, was also impressed by this dish. In his 1890 La Cuisine Messine (Cooking from Metz), he includes a recipe for carpe à la juive from Lorraine. I have seen variants that use nutmeg and saffron as well. Taillevent has a recipe in Le Viandier of 1485 for the sweet-and-sour cameline sauce, so named for its tawny camel color, which includes ginger, cinnamon, cloves, grains of paradise, pepper, mastic, galangal, nutmeg, saffron, sugar, anise, vinegar, wine, and sometimes raisins. Most of the spices were trafficked from far corners of the world by Jewish and other merchants. Mastic, also known as gum arabic, is the resin from the acacia tree and has a sweet, licorice flavor; grains of paradise, sometimes used in making beer today, have an aromatic peppery taste, almost like cardamom and coriander; and galangal, a rhizome related to ginger, has a hot, peppery flavor. The carp with its sweet-and-sour sauce became a Jewish staple, brought out for the Sabbath and holidays, and surviving, as traditional recipes do, in the Jewish community to this day. Although the original recipe calls for a 3-pound carp, washed, cut into steaks, and then arranged back into the original shape of the fish, I often use a single large salmon or grouper or bass fillet instead.

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.

When I ate dinner at the Home of Nathalie Berrebi, a Frenchwoman living in Geneva, she served this savory quick bread warm and sliced thin, as a first course for a dinner attended by lots of children and adults. For the main course, Nathalie prepared rouget (red mullet) with an eggplant tapenade on top, something all the children loved. The entire dinner was delicious, but I especially liked that savory bread with the unexpected flavor combination of goat cheese, apricots, and fresh mint. Now I often make this quick bread for brunch or lunch and serve it with a green salad.

The French love their bread, but they usually buy it in boulangeries. In many homes I visited, though, people would make a quick bread like the goat-cheese-and-apricot bread on page 145. When they had a bit more time, on a weekend morning perhaps, they would make a heartier bread and eat it throughout the week. This recipe, which I tasted at a friend’s house in Paris, is very forgiving and can withstand additions and variations. I often add bits of leftover nuts and dried fruit. Great for breakfast with goat cheese or preserves, it is also a wonderful sandwich bread.

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!

No bread form is so complety identified with Jews as the bagel, which came from eastern Europe with immigrants, mostly from/Lód´z, Poland, at the turn of the last century. Unlike American bagels, French bagels were rather like rolls that were baked but not boiled. When Euro Disney and the United States Army in Europe wanted bagels in the late seventies, they asked Joseph Korcarz, whose family ran a bakery in the Marais, to go to the United States to learn the commercial technique of boiling the dough before baking. Two older bread forms, however, might shed new light on the origins of the bagel. In the mountains of Savoie, near the Swiss border, an area with few if any Jews today, there is a specialty of the region—an ancient anise-flavored bread called riouttes, which were boiled before baking, a technique that kept the bread fresher a longer time. Riouttes might have come to the mountains with Jews or with Arabs, who make ka’ak (“bracelet” in Arabic), small, round, crispy rolls with a hole, flavored with anise and sesame seeds. Probably the oldest bagel-like roll in France, however, dating back to antiquity, is the Provençal brassado, also called brassadeau. Sweet and round, with a hole in the center, they are also first boiled and then baked, much like bagels. The word brassado is related to the Spanish and Portuguese words for the physical act of an embrace or a hug. The unusual inclusion of floral scents like orange-flower and rose water could be the influence of Jews involved in the perfume industry in Grasse. This particular recipe is an adaptation of brassados found by Martine Yana in her Trésors de la Table Juive.

Like many Moroccan Jews who came to France after Morocco became independent in 1956, Deborah Lilliane Denino, a psychologist, and her family were welcomed by the Jewish community in Strasbourg. Down the street from her apartment is a kosher bakery, grocery, and butcher shop called Délices Cacher, where she buys merguez lamb and beef sausage and other Moroccan items on which she grew up in Marrakesh. When she is busy, she asks one of her three children or the American students with the Syracuse University Junior Year Abroad program who live with her to fetch the groceries. She teaches those not familiar with a kosher kitchen about the color- coded forks, towels, and other utensils, to identify and keep separate the meat and milk dishes she cooks in her apartment. For Shabbat, this great cook with a fun- loving family always makes Moroccan challah. But because her children, who were born in Strasbourg, like soft pretzels (as do most Alsatian children—they call them bretzeln), she sets aside some of the dough, forms long fingers out of it, twists them into pretzels, and bakes them as a snack.

On a recent visit to the Marais, I stopped in at Florence Finkelsztajn’s Traiteur Delicatessen, as I always do. The quarter has two Finkelsztajn delicatessens, one trimmed in yellow (Florence’s ex-husband’s) and one in blue (Florence’s—now renamed Kahn). According to Gilles Pudlowski, the gastronomic critic of Polish Jewish origin who writes the popular Pudlo restaurant guides, Florence’s store is the best place to satisfy a nostalgic craving for eastern European cooking. In addition to Central European Yiddish specialties, like herring, chopped liver, and pastrami, Florence also sells Pudlo, baked in the back of the shop. I have made her recipe, which she gave me a few years ago, and I can assure you it is delicious. Pletzl, short for Bialystoker tsibele pletzl, refers to a circular eastern European flat onion bread, often studded with poppy seeds, that came from the city of Bialystok, Poland. The bread is known in America in a smaller version as the bialy. Try it as a snack hot from the oven, or make a “big pletzl sandwich,” as Florence does. Her fillings vary as much as the different ethnicities of Jews living in Paris today: Alsatian pickelfleisch (corned beef), Romanian pastrami, Russian eggplant caviar (see page 34), North African roasted peppers, and French tomato and lettuce.

Once, I asked two-star Michelin chef Thierry Marx of Cordeillan-Bages in Pauillac, the greatest wine-producing area of France, why he uses beets in so many of his dishes—beets for color, beets for sweetness, beets for texture, and beet borscht purée. He replied that he likes to play with the flavors and shapes of his childhood, reminding him of his Jewish grandmother from Poland, who raised him in Paris. “Cooking is a transmission of love,” he told me. One wouldn’t necessarily think of the food Thierry serves in his stunning restaurant as particularly Jewish—it is so molecular, so Japanese (because of where he studied), and so French (because of where he grew up). The dining room of the château, decked out in sleek blackand-white furniture with hints of red, looks out on a vineyard laden with ripe dark grapes ready for picking. But when the bread basket arrived, it contained what looked like a miniature chocolate or poppy-seed babka. My first bite, though, told me that I had still been fooled. This trompe l’oeil was in fact a savory babka, filled with olives, anchovies, and fennel—a delicious French take on a sweet Polish and Jewish classic.

When Huguette Uhry married a local butcher from the town of Ingwiller in Alsace, her sisterin-law lived with her, helping with the cooking. They usually had eighteen people for lunch and dinner, including children, friends, and workers. Today, retired and living in nearby Bollwiller, Madame Uhry is known throughout Alsace as a great cook. Some of her recipes appear on the Web site judaisme.sdv.fr. Here is her brioche, which she starts one day and bakes Rosh Hashanah morning for breakfast, before the family goes to synagogue.

“Look at that beautiful brioche,” I overheard a guest saying at a Bat Mitzvah in Geneva. The brioche was the glistening round challah made by Nicole Garai, the rabbi’s wife. During the service at the hidden Quai du Seujet Synagogue, located near the Rhône River, Nicole helps her husband by escorting assigned readers to the bima (platform). The Garais, French Jews, came to Switzerland to start this synagogue in the 1980s. Nicole told me that she bakes challah for people of whom she is fond, like her congregant, Juliette Laurent, braiding it in a round to signify the circle of life for Rosh Hodesh (the first of the month); she also makes it for the new year, and for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. I especially liked the way she decorated the challah, by first liberally sprinkling a thick band of sesame seeds, then poppy seeds all over the top of the bread. Another trick she uses is to brush the bread twice: once at the beginning of the second rise, after the bread is braided, and again just before she pops it into a cold oven. The procedure of turning on the heat after the bread is in the oven must date back a long time, at least to the beginning of home wood ovens.

Daniel Helmstetter lives his life by the sign that hangs above his bakery in Colmar: “Le talent et la passion.” A fourth-generation baker, he told me that he “fell into the mixer and never came out.” The Helmstetter Bakery was started by his grandfather in 1906 in the central square of Colmar, a town once known for its large Jewish population. Each Thursday and Friday, Daniel still makes barches au pavot, an oval-shaped challah with poppy seeds and a thin braid on top, for his Jewish clientele. Barches (also spelled berches), which means “twisted,” is also a derivation of the Hebrew word birkat (blessing), from the verse in Proverbs 10:22, Birkat Adonai hi ta-ashir, “The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich.” “A local rabbi said that the braid represents the tribes of Israel,” Daniel told me over coffee and pastry at his home near the bakery. “And the poppy seeds, the manna in the desert.” Poppy seeds, once grown in the region, may have disappeared from the fields, but the taste from them lingers on. For his barches, Daniel makes a dough that is tighter than his baguette dough, so that it can be easily braided. In a few nineteenth-century versions, boiled potatoes were substituted for some of the flour in the dough, perhaps to help preserve the loaf over the course of the Sabbath.

This is a recipe that Natan Holchaker, an avid cook, makes in Bordeaux. In a take on the classic frisée and lardons, Natan uses duck instead of the prohibited pork. I have found that in France even the most secular French Jews avoid pork, substituting smoked duck instead. You can also substitute turkey bacon or kosher beef fry (akin to pastrami).

At a recent Kiddush after a Bat Mitzvah service in France, the wine was French, unlike the sweet wine usually served at American synagogues. The food was elegantly prepared, as only the French can do it: spread out on a large table were thin slices of smoked salmon on toast, eggplant rolled and filled with goat cheese, a North African sautéed-pepper salad, squash soup served in tiny cups, and celery-root rémoulade. If you have never eaten celery-root salad, then start now! And if you’ve never made mayonnaise before, it’s an exhilarating and rewarding experience that I highly recommend. Any leftover mayonnaise can be kept in a jar in the refrigerator for a few days.

Guy Weyl was a little boy during World War II, when his parents fled the Nazis, first hiding in the Dordogne and then crossing the border into Spain when France became too dangerous. They then went to Portugal, and from there took a boat to New York, where they stayed through the rest of the war. The whole time Guy was in the United States, he missed the green lentils from France. During the war, lentils were just beginning to gain popularity in New York as a wartime alternative to meat, but they still were not the delicacy they were in France. So, when Guy returned to France and went to school, he was thrilled to eat lentils again, but his schoolmates laughed at his fondness for them, because that was all they had had to eat during the war. This hasn’t lessened his ardor for the tiny green pulses, and Guy’s wife, Eveline, makes a wonderful lentil salad.

The seeds of cultivated fennel, like eggplant, are said to have been brought to France by Jews and other merchants. Of course, wild fennel grows everywhere in the south of France. I have tasted this salad in many North African French homes. It is very simple, and a lovely counterpoint to all the more elaborate salads of the North African tradition. Once the fennel and celery have begun to wilt a bit, the flavors all come together. If pomegranates are not in season, substitute dried cranberries or cherries.