Bean and Legume

Serve with an arugula or spinach salad.

I called this recipe “3 beans and some chicken” because I didn’t want to put on any airs. If you’re having people over for dinner and your guests inquire what you are serving, by all means posh it up and inform them that you are preparing “Lemon-Scented Sautéed Poulet with Legume Ragout.” Snap!

This thick soup is a ribollita (stale bread soup) made with tons of tomatoes. Torello (literally, “The Bull”) from Florence makes his with tomatoes grown on his own land in Tuscany. At his restaurant, Il Latini, he taught me the manner—the only manner—in which one eats any type of ribollita: with chopped raw onions and a drizzle of EVOO on top. If you are not committed to this process or if you don’t do raw onions, skip this recipe. You’re not to eat it any other way. Torello will find out, and I’ll be in for it!

A “stoup” is what I call a soup that is almost as thick as a stew. This one can be prepared as a vegetarian entrée as well by omitting the ham.

Green beans and almonds are a classic combination. Here we’ve given it our own interpretation by pairing the blanched green beans with an almond-yogurt dressing. We like French feta for this because it tends to be sweeter and less salty than Greek or Bulgarian feta. This is a wonderful cold dish that travels well for picnics or meals on the go.

This is one of those simple French vegetable combinations that just taste really good, especially for Friday night dinner, next to a well-roasted chicken. Although it has become popular to cook green beans for a short time, I still prefer them when they are meltingly tender!

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.

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.

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.

One Friday morning when I arrived at Philippe and Caroline’s home, the family was in full Shabbat swing. Four of Caroline’s nine children were nearby to help with preparations for the Sabbath. Caroline was assembling ingredients for cholent, based on a recipe that came with her family from Poland. Caroline makes cholent each week, cooking it all night in a slow cooker and serving it at lunch on Saturday. She simmers the meat in red wine, adds some barley and sometimes bulgur, and uses vegetable oil instead of the traditional chicken shmaltz.

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.