Herbs & Spices

In markets all over France, I saw stalls with freshly boiled and peeled beets, which saves cooks from dyeing their hands the telltale pink that comes from handling beets. Since we seldom have this convenience in America, I prefer to roast my beets to intensify their earthy flavor, and then carefully peel and cut them. Beets and cumin marry well and look beautiful when sprinkled with lots of green cilantro.

This classic french potato salad is very simple. A non-Jewish version might include lardons (a type of bacon) and shallots, but instead I use a tart mayonnaise. For a North African touch, you can add sliced hard-boiled eggs and cured black olives. I often add julienned basil with the parsley, or other compatible herbs.

Artichokes, one of my favorite vegetable, are edible thistles that were prized by the ancient Romans as food of the nobility. They have been a springtime food in the Mediterranean for thousands of years and particularly loved by Jews. Usually the French serve artichokes as a cold salad appetizer with a vinaigrette. Although I have seen this recipe in many Jewish cookbooks from North Africa, I hadn’t tasted it until Paula Wolfert cooked it for me on my PBS show, Jewish Cooking in America. It was a merveille, as my French friends would say. In the years since, I have eaten many different versions of this salad. Céline Bénitah, who lives in Annecy but came from Berkane, on the Algerian border of Morocco, said that all North African Jews who grew up in this orange- growing region have their own versions of this recipe. Hers includes saffron. Of course, this salad tastes best when fresh artichokes are used, but frozen artichoke hearts or bottoms work as well.

When I embark on a cookbook, it’s like going on a scavenger hunt. One clue leads to another. Sometimes they lead to unexpected findings, such as this wonderful cooked salad of Jewish origins. Someone in Washington had told me that Élisabeth Bourgeois, the chef and owner of Le Mas Tourteron, a restaurant just outside of Gordes, in the Lubéron, was Jewish. One Sunday afternoon, a friend and I drove two hours from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence to the charming stone house with old wooden beams and antique furniture that is her restaurant. Although I had no idea what mas tourteron meant, an atmosphere of bonhomie filled this farmhouse (mas) of lovebirds (tourterons) as soon as Élisabeth and her husband greeted us. When I explained my quest to Élisabeth, asking her if she was Jewish, she replied, “Pas du tout” (“Not at all”). I thought our journey would be for naught, but since we arrived at lunchtime, we sat down to eat. And what a meal we had! Our first course was a trio of tiny late-summer vegetables served in individual cups on a long glass platter: a cucumber salad with crème fraîche and lots of chives and mint; a cold zucchini cream soup; and a luscious ratatouille-like tomato salad, the third member of the trio. When I asked Élisabeth for the recipe for this last dish, she said without hesitation, “Ça, c’est la salade juive!” (“That is the Jewish salad!”) She explained that the recipe came from a Moroccan Jewish woman who had worked in her kitchen for about thirty years. Now it is part of her summer cooking repertoire and mine. This recipe calls for coriandre, a word that the French use for both the fresh leaves and the seeds of the coriander or cilantro plant. This dish uses both. I serve it either as a salad or as a cold pasta sauce, and make it during every season, even with canned tomatoes in winter. It is always a hit.

Chef Daniel Rose starts his day in the kitchen at 7:30 a.m. He begins with the chicken broth, first browning chicken wings, then adding a wine reduction, and then water, leeks, and other aromatics, but never carrots. “This isn’t the way my grandmother would have done it,” Daniel told me. “But we don’t want so much sweetness in our soup.” He doesn’t bother with a bouquet garni: “I just stick the herbs in the pot.” Freeze any broth that you don’t use right away.

The recipe for these Knepfle, also known as quenelles de matzo or the more prosaic matzo balls, came from Madame Maryse Weil of Besançon, the late mother-in-law of my friend Nanou, French matzo balls, often called boulettes in French and Knödeln in German, are made from stale bread or matzo sheets, soaked in water and dried. These dumplings are neither as big as American matzo balls—they are the size of walnuts rather than golf balls—nor as fluffy, since no baking powder is used. Like many middle-class women in her day, Madame Weil rarely cooked but instead guided those who cooked in her kitchen. Her original recipe read, “Take as many eggs as goose fat. Mix well; add salt, pepper, and ginger and enough matzo meal so you can roll them.” Many of the old recipes, including this one, often substitute marrow for the goose fat. I prefer to cook the matzo balls in boiling salted water and then immediately transfer them with a slotted spoon to homemade chicken broth. This way I can make them in advance, and the soup remains clear.

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.

I have always thought that the best part of fish soup is the rouille, a peppery, garlicky sauce that is slathered on toasted rounds of baguette and floated on the surface of the soup. I also like to stir some rouille into the broth. Similar to the Provençal aioli, a garlic-flavored mayonnaise, rouille is flavored with hot pepper and saffron, which give it its signature rust color. (Rouille literally means “rust” in French.) Today I have noticed that North African Jews often spice up their rouille even more, by adding a little harissa (see page 33) to it. Traditionally, a mortar and pestle are used to pound the garlic, pepper, and egg yolk, gradually incorporating the oil to make a mayonnaise. Today it is easy to put everything in a food processor and slowly add the oil, drop by drop. Leftover sauce is good on sandwiches or as a dip.

In the Charming Town of Cagnes-sur-Mer, whose Jewish population of four hundred comes mostly from Morocco, I tasted a delicious fish soup. This particular recipe is one that painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who lived in the town, would have relished.

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.

Sometimes in the ninth century, or perhaps earlier, Baltic fishermen figured out that curing herring in salt would preserve it. Caught and immediately salted to prevent spoilage, the fish was then brought back to French ports to be sold, often by Jewish purveyors who transported it up the Rhône. Salting fish was so important in the medieval period that salt-fish mongers, like fresh-fish mongers, had their own stores for salted, dried, and brined fish such as herring and cod. Because the fish had not in fact been cooked, rabbis considered salted fish to be kosher even if it had been salted by gentiles. For centuries Jews in northern France, who couldn’t eat pork, ate herring as their daily protein. It was prepared in a variety of ways, most often first soaked in milk to remove the excess saltiness, then dressed with vinegar and oil, and served with lots of sliced raw onion and hot boiled potatoes. Jews in France have put a French touch on their herring dishes, serving them as an appetizer rather than as a main course. They usually prepare the herring with either a horseradish sauce with apples, hard-boiled eggs, and beets, or a mustard-dill sauce with sugar, cream, and vinegar. To break the fast of Yom Kippur, Alsatian Jews use a sweet-and-sour cream sauce with their herring.

Brik are crisp, flaky appetizers found in Tunisian, Algerian, and Moroccan kitchens in France. The word refers to the dough, similar to the Moroccan warka, which one makes by tossing fistfuls of a wet, pastelike batter onto a hot grill. The batter miraculously spreads into a thin, pliable sheet, which may be used as an appetizer or dessert wrapper. You can find unbaked feuilles de brik (brik leaves) in Middle Eastern food stores or online (see A Source Guide, page 370). If you can’t, use wonton wrappers instead, or even phyllo dough, although your finished product will not have the same grainy texture as real brik. I often make these filled pastries as an appetizer at Hanukkah, instead of potato pancakes.

A mixture of aromatic (and generally expensive) spices that according to the ancient Ayurvedic system of medicine are meant to heat the body. This is the only spice mixture that I ask you to make at home and keep in storage. Its aroma is unsurpassed if mixed and ground at home in small quantities. Also, it will not contain cheap “filler” spices, such as coriander seeds, as many commercial mixtures do. I do keep the store-bought mixture in my cupboard as well for use in certain dishes that require less perfume. My recipes will tell you which one to use.

This recipe is very similar to the last, only a bit grander.

In India and Pakistan a very fine pasta, known as seviyan, is used for this quick pudding. Most grocers in the West sell it laid out in long, slim boxes, but in cities like Lahore you can find it in open markets—all exposed, in the shape of little nests of thin pasta piled up into a mountain. The pasta is broken up and lightly browned before it is cooked into a pudding. I find that angel-hair pasta, which often comes in the shape of nests, makes a very good substitute for seviyan, and that is what I have started to use. This pudding may be eaten hot, warm, or at room temperature. In Pakistan, it is known as sheer korma and in India as seviyan ki kheer. On a cold wintry day in North India or Pakistan there is nothing nicer than a warm version of this pudding. The nuts and raisins are optional. You may leave them out altogether and then, if you like, just sprinkle some chopped almonds or pistachios over the top.

This pudding is cooked just like the preceding one but with a few additions.

This rice pudding is known as kheer in North India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and eaten under different names throughout South Asia. It consists, in its basic version, of nothing more than milk, cardamom for flavor and aroma, rice, and sugar. In villages and towns, rice harvests are generally celebrated with a kheer. In some communities, new husbands and wives feed each other a spoonful of kheer during the final part of the wedding ritual. It may be served lukewarm, at room temperature, or cold. Because it is associated with celebration, expensive ingredients are often added, such as saffron, nuts, and dried fruit. Here is the basic version, the one I love the most; you may scatter a tablespoon of chopped pistachios over the top before serving.

What is required here is not a cream that one can go out and buy. This “cream” is really a kind of pudding or kheer, thickened by boiling milk down, not by adding starch to it. In order to take some of the labor out of the process, Indians have taken to adding condensed milk. This works very well indeed. This is a thinnish cream, ideal to serve with fruit. I put the cut-up fruit (mangoes, guavas, pears, peaches, and bananas are ideal, but I have used berries as well) in individual bowls, or in old-fashioned ice cream cups, and then pour the flavored cream over the top.

Tapioca pearls and sago pearls are made from two completely different plants, the first from the starchy tapioca/cassava root and the other from the starchy pith removed from the trunk of the sago palm. One originated in the New World, the other in Southeast Asia. Yet the two are endlessly confused. Since their starch is very similar, it hardly matters where cooking is concerned. Indian grocers often put both names, tapioca pearls and sagudana or sabudana (sago pearls), on the same packet. I grew up with this kheer, or pudding. When I came home from school in the middle of a hot afternoon, my mother would have individual terra-cotta bowls of this waiting in the refrigerator. It was very simple and basic, nothing more than milk, sago, cardamom for flavor, and sugar. We called it sagudanay ki kheer, or sago pearl pudding, though it may well have been made with tapioca pearls.