Bean and Legume

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Dr. Sylviane Lévy (see page 65), a physician in Paris, got married, she had a Passover dilemma. Her husband’s Tunisian family ate m’soki, a verdant soupy ragout with spring vegetables—like artichokes (considered a Jewish vegetable), spinach, and peas—and meat; her family, originally from Toledo, Spain, and later from Tétouan, Morocco, ate a thick meat- and- fava- bean soup. So which did she choose? Instead of picking sides, she serves both at her Seder. Now her grown children associate these soups with the taste of home. M’soki, also called béton armé (reinforced concrete) because of its heartiness, is so popular in France today that Tunisians, Algerians, and anyone who has tasted it now prepares it for Passover, and at special events throughout the year. This very ancient soup, probably dating from the eleventh century, would have included lamb, cinnamon, rose petals, and white or yellow carrots. It would not have included harissa, as peppers were a New World import.

Eveline Weyl remembers growing up in France with a green-wheat soup, served every Friday evening. “We called it gruen kern or soupe au blé vert, and it was made, basically, by simmering onions and carrots and using green wheat to thicken the broth,” she told me. “My mother said it was very healthy for us children.” I asked all over for a recipe for this dish but couldn’t find one. Then, watching a Tunisian videographer from Paris taking photographs of his mother making soup, I realized that the soup Tunisians call shorbat freekeh, made with parched wheat, is nearly the same as the green-wheat soup for which I had been searching. Young green wheat is available at select health-food stores these days, and made into juice. Ferik or freekeh is the parched substitute. I like this soup so much that I often use barley, bulgur, wheat berries, or lentils if I can’t find the green wheat. In fourteenth-century Arles, Jews ate many different kinds of grains and legumes. Chickpeas, which came from the Middle East, and green wheat were probably two of them. The original recipe for this soup called for lamb bones, but I prefer a vegetarian version. The tomato paste is, of course, a late addition.

Dried fava bean, a North African staple, taste very different from their fresh counterparts, which are only available for a short time in the spring. After they cook for a few hours with garlic, cumin, and harissa, they become creamy and take on an earthy heat that is especially comforting on colder days. When served with a hunk of baguette, this soup could very well make an entire weeknight meal.

Thanks to emigrants from North Africa, Passover is once again being celebrated in the town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, which had a flourishing Jewish community until the fourteenth century. Now Jews reunite for the holidays, and at a recent Passover in one house, several couples got together for a traditional meal. Jocelyne Akoun, the hostess of this event, told me about a springtime soup filled with fresh vegetables and fava beans. Because I always have vegetarians at my own Seder, I have taken to making this refreshing and colorful soup as an alternative to my traditional matzo-ball chicken soup. If making the vegetarian version, sauté the onion in the oil in a large soup pot, then add 8 cups water, the bay leaf, cloves, peppercorns, and 1 teaspoon salt, and cook for about an hour. Then put through a sieve and continue as you would with the beef broth. Fresh fava beans are a sign of spring for Moroccan Jews, because the Jews supposedly ate fava beans, poor man’s meat, when they were slaves in Egypt.

This is a very quick recipe, even quicker today because of Picard Surgelés, the French chain of grocery stores selling superb frozen food products. Although the vegetables are not certified kosher, even the Beth Din of Paris, the religious governance, approves of their use. I tasted this particular soup at a Shabbat dinner at the home of North African–born Sylviane and Gérard Lévy. Gérard, who is a well-known Chinese-antique dealer on Paris’s Left Bank, recited the prayer over the sweet raisin wine sipped on the Sabbath in French homes. Everyone then went into the next room for the ritual hand-washing. When they returned, Gérard said the blessing over the two challahs before enjoying the meat meal, which began with this creamy (but creamless) frozen-pea-and-tarragon soup.

When I stayed at La Royante, a charming bed-and-breakfast in Aubagne just outside of Marseille, I tasted the delicious homemade jam from the fig, cherry, and apricot trees near the terrace, and enjoyed the olive oil made from the olives in the orchard. I talked with Xenia and Bernard Saltiel, the owners, and learned that Bernard is Jewish and traces his ancestry in France to about the thirteenth century, when his people became tax collectors for the king of France in Perpignan. Then they went to Narbonne, and finally to Montpellier, where a Saltiel helped found the University of Medicine. When the Jews were expelled from France, the Saltiel family moved to Greece, and lived in Crete, Macedonia, and then Thessalonika. Ever since Bernard’s grandfather returned to France in 1892, Saltiels have lived in the Marseille area. Today Bernard is a man of Provence, sniffing vegetables at the local market in Aubagne to make sure they are fresh enough for a good soupe au pistou. This soup originated in nearby Italy, most probably in Genoa. Provençal Jewish versions include a selection of dried beans as well as fresh green, wax, or fava beans, fresh basil, and an especially strong dose of garlic. Make it in the summer with perfectly ripe tomatoes. In the winter, I substitute good canned tomatoes.

When I first ate this Sri Lankan pickle, known simply as Singhala Achcharu, it was made with green beans and carrots, but it may be made with other vegetables as well, including green papaya, found in East Asian and South Asian markets, and cauliflower. You may combine all these vegetables if you like, cutting each of them so the pieces are more or less the same size.

Here is an easy everyday yogurt relish. I like to use a good whole-milk yogurt here, but if you prefer a low-fat variety it would work well too. My cherry tomatoes were on the larger side so I cut each into eight portions. Use more if they are smaller and just quarter them. Serve with most Indian meals or eat by itself as a snack.

Here is one of the great offerings from Kerala, a state on the southwest coast of India, where it is known as uppama. The semolina that is required here is a coarse-grained variety that is sold as sooji or rava in the Indian stores or as 10-minute Cream of Wheat in the supermarkets. (It is not the very fine version used to make pasta.) This pilaf-like dish may be eaten as a snack with tea, for breakfast with milky coffee and an accompanying coconut chutney (see Sri Lankan Cooked Coconut Chutney), or as part of a meal as the exquisite starch.

There are hundreds of versions of this salad-like dish that are eaten throughout South India and parts of western India as well. At its base is rice, the local starch and staple. (Think of the bread soups of Italy and the bread salads of the Middle East.) The rice is cooked so it is quite soft. Then yogurt, and sometimes a little milk as well, is added as well as any fruit (apple, grapes, pomegranate), raw vegetables (diced tomatoes, cucumbers), or lightly blanched vegetables (green beans, zucchini, peas) that one likes. The final step is what makes the salad completely Indian. A tiny amount of oil is heated and spices such as mustard seeds, curry leaves, and red chilies are thrown into it. Then the seasoned oil is poured over the rice salad to give it its pungency and reason for being. This cooling, soothing dish, somewhat like a risotto, makes a wonderful lunch. It is best served at room temperature, without being refrigerated. Other salads may be added to the meal.

Bulgar, a wheat that has been cooked, cracked, and dried, is used in parts of the Punjab (northwestern India) to make a variety of nutritious pilafs. The coarser-grained bulgar is ideal here. Serve as you would a rice pilaf.

We eat this very nutritious rice dish a lot and frequently serve it to our guests. It is almost a meal in itself, and may be served simply with Karhi, a yogurt sauce, and any vegetable you like.

One of the oldest Indian dishes and continuously popular these thousands of years is khichri, a dish of rice and split peas. (Starting around the Raj period, the British began to serve a version of khichri in their country homes for breakast: they removed the dal, added fish, and called it kedgeree.) There are two general versions of it: one is dry, like well-cooked rice, where each grain is separate, and the other is wet, like a porridge. Both are delicious. The first is more elegant, the second more soothing. This is the first, the dry version. Serve it like rice, with all manner of curries.

Not only does this rice look colorful and taste delicious but the turmeric acts like an antiseptic inside the body and the sesame seeds add a good deal of nutrition. You can almost eat this by itself. Add a dal, perhaps an eggplant dish, and a yogurt relish, and you have a fine vegetarian meal. Or serve with kebabs of any sort and a salad for a light, non-vegetarian meal.

The Indian split peas, arhar dal and toovar (or toor) dal, are closely related. Both are the hulled and split descendants of the pigeon pea. Arhar, the North Indian version, is milder in flavor, whereas toovar, used in West and South India, tends to be darker and earthier. Use whichever you can find. If you cannot find either, use yellow split peas. Serve with rice or Indian flatbreads. Add a vegetable and relishes to complete the meal. Non-vegetarians may add meat or fish, if they like.

This is a Bengali specialty that requires that the moong dal (hulled and split mung beans) be lightly roasted first and then, when the dal is almost done, quick-cooking greens such as mustard greens, spinach, or green chard are added to make it more nourishing. There are several tiny steps required here, but each is simplicity itself. I find that most split peas and beans are so clean these days that they need no picking over. You do need to rinse them off. In the case of this recipe, the rinsing is done after the roasting, for obvious reasons. Bengalis might use mustard oil for the final seasoning. It complements the mustard greens and adds its own unique flavor. But since it is frowned upon by Western food authorities for the harmful acids it contains, I have started using extra virgin olive oil instead, another strong flavor, though a different one. For many peasants, such a dal, served with rice and perhaps followed by a yogurt dessert, makes for a rich, ample meal. You may add a fish dish.