French

After getting reacquainted over a game of Ping-Pong with Caroline and Philippe Moos, cousins I had not seen in many years, I joined them for a dairy dinner with four of their nine children in their house in Aix-les-Bains (see page 212). The meal was delicious, consisting of a vegetable soup, an apricot tart for dessert, and this Savoyard tomato-and-cheese quiche as the main course. This is one of those great recipes in which you can substitute almost any leftover cheese you may have in your refrigerator.

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.

To the Horror of chef Daniel Rose (see page 68) of Spring Restaurant in Paris, it is impossible to find an American brisket in France. It just doesn’t exist. American butchers tend to cut larger pieces of meat. Five- or six-pound briskets (poitrines) or huge rib-eye steaks (entrecôtes) are the result of sawing through the muscle or the shoulder section of the animal. French butchers, by contrast, cut around the contours of the muscles to yield more tender but much smaller pieces. French Jews tend to use a breast of veal that usually has a pocket inside it for stuffing for their brisket. In this version, Daniel applies French techniques to make a perfectly delicious brisket with a subtle hint of orange in the sauce. I always make this dish a day in advance.

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.

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.

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.

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!