Root Vegetable

The earliest known French potato dish is pommes de terre dauphinoises, which originated in Switzerland in 1600. I tasted this divine dish of scalloped potato, cheese, and milk, a specialty of the region near Annecy, at the home of Ruth Moos (see page 3), who made it as an evening dairy meal served with a salad and vegetables. Instead of covering the potatoes and the cheese with the traditional beef bouillon or broth, Ruth makes it kosher style using only cream or milk.

Old cookbooks of Jewish families from Provence and descendants of the Juifs du Pape contain a famous dish combining spinach and morue (salt cod; see page 290). Morue is also blended with mashed potatoes to make brandade, a typical dish of the south of France. The preserved fish is rehydrated in milk or water, and then grilled, fried, or baked. Fritters were particularly common, and are still prevalent throughout Spain and Portugal. This recipe, a modern interpretation of a traditional salt-cod-and-potato brandade, was created by Chef Daniel Rose (see page 68). He uses fresh cod, salting it briefly to remove the excess moisture, seasons it with thyme and garlic, and then cooks it in milk and olive oil. Mixed with mashed potatoes and fried, the result yields a sort of latke that can be served as an appetizer, a side dish, or a main course, with the fennel-and-citrus salad on page 110.

Although potato pancakes (or latkes) go by many names in France—palets de pommes de terre, pommes dauphines, the Alsatian grumbeerkischle, and matafans, a mashed-potato latke typical of Savoie—a latke by any other name is still a latke. In Poland, these egg-free latkes are made with older potatoes, whose increased starch helps bind them together. You can just dress the traditional latke with a dollop of applesauce, or you can try a variation made with apples and sugar.

This recipe, made from mashed potatoes fried in little patties, came from Poland to Metz a century ago. I have tasted different versions of Passover and Hanukkah chremslach, whose name refers to the well in the pan in which they were traditionally formed before frying. Sometimes stuffed with meat, they should be eaten piping hot, as directly from the pan as your fingers and tongue can stand.

Winter in France means chestnuts, particularly roasted in a long-handled frying pan in the coals. Ever since my mother introduced me to the nuts as a child, they have had a special place in my heart. This winter melding of chestnuts, onions, and prunes is a common Alsatian dish. You can add celeriac to the delicious mix, or, if you like it a little sour, increase the vinegar or lemon juice.

This is one of my favorite winter Alsatian vegetable combinations, and a common winter vegetable dish of French Jews. It is best made a day in advance and left to meld the flavors. Serve as an accompaniment to roast goose, chicken, or duck.

The word Cassolita comes from the Spanish word cassola or cazuela, which refers both to a round clay pot and that which is cooked in it. A Sephardic squash dish from Tétouan, Morocco, this cassolita is scented with cinnamon and caramelized onions and gets a nice crunch from the almonds. It is typically served with lamb couscous (see page 236), although it goes well with any hearty meat dish. When I made it for a dinner party for my editor, Judith Jones, all the high-powered foodies attending asked me for the recipe. It can be made ahead and then reheated before serving.

Like Michel Goldberg, Natan Holchaker was a little boy during the Nazi occupation. When the war started, his father moved to a small village in the Dordogne with a little garden and a well. One day his father told him to “disappear,” and he and his brother left to live with peasants in the countryside. Two days later, the Germans attacked. Throughout the war, he and his brother lived on farms, helping to pick crops and learning how to find porcini mushrooms, which they gathered for the farmers. This delicious recipe comes from Natan and his wife, Josiane Torrès-Holchaker. Josiane’s ancestors came to Bordeaux from Portugal in the sixteenth century. Although they lived outwardly as Marranos, or New Christians, the Torrès-Vedras family continued to live as Jews at home. In 1790, the National Assembly decreed that all the Portuguese and Spanish Jews in France would enjoy the rights of active citizens. As we were driving with Natan and Josiane toward the Médoc wine country in Bordeaux, they suddenly stopped the car, jumped out, and looked at the cèpes (porcini mushrooms) that were being sold by the road. They were so excited, as only the French can be, in anticipation of cooking the mushrooms. “See how fresh these are,” said Josiane. “They are shiny and white, the cap is closed, and they aren’t green inside, a sign of their being too old.” She told me that sometimes she just serves the mushrooms raw, dicing and marinating them first in lemon juice. Then she described the way her mother prepared porcini.

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.

The French are crazy about seasonal vegetables, and particularly, I am happy to say, about fennel. A flavoring that is mentioned in the Mishnah around 200 C.E., fennel is used in both sweet and savory preparations. This particular dish was served as an accompaniment to fish with beurre-blanc sauce at a Bat Mitzvah that I attended in Geneva. I especially like its intense, sharp flavor.

In the movie Ratatouille, the rat made a tian of eggplant and other vegetables, set vertically in a baking dish. A similar dish came down in the family of Gérard Monteux, whose ancestors have made this dish since tomatoes came to Provence. The keys to the recipe are to make sure that the tomatoes and onions are of the same diameter as the eggplant, and to use a square or rectangular baking dish. I have made it in a French tian, but you can use any pan about 9 inches square. Good any time of year, it is spectacular in the summer, when tomatoes are at their best.

I used to think that this dish, called carciofi alla giudea, originated in Rome. But now I am not so sure. When I was visiting Barcelona last spring, it seemed as if every restaurant, every bar, every street vendor was selling this crispy delicacy of deep-fried artichoke flavored with herbs and garlic and served cold. I love it. This is a recipe that has come down in the family of Violette Corcos Abulafia Tapiero Budestchu of Paris.

This delicious cauliflower dish comes from Michelle Cahen Bamberger, whose family had lived in Lorraine since “forever,” as she told me, until World War II brought her to the south of France, where she was forced into hiding. Madame Bamberger says that she feels and cooks French. And she feels French first and Jewish second, despite all that she went through during the war. “One day, I was going home with a bottle of wine under my arm to the place we were hiding in Lyon during the war,” she told me in the parlor of the apartment in Toulon where she and her husband now live. “I saw the Gestapo coming, so, instead of going into the house, I kept walking and saved myself. When we were in hiding, our life wasn’t bad compared with others. Because my parents were in the clothing industry, we traded fabric for butter and rabbits. I remember one day we received a lamb roast. That was really something.” Her cauliflower dish, with its crunchy golden exterior, is similar to ones I have tasted in Israel and elsewhere.

Gerard Monteux, who is a descendant of the Juifs du Pape, told me that this was a very famous dish from Carpentras, eaten at Purim. (It is also a Lenten dish.) In this town, which had an oven in the Jewish quarter, cooks prepared the dish at home, putting it in an earthenware tian. They then brought it to the public oven and baked it, fetching it when it was done. Our modern-day casserole dishes have evolved from this tradition.

The secret of Hélène’s ratatouille is to cook the vegetables separately in the oven, intensifying their individual flavors. This may seem like using a lot of pans, but it is mostly waiting time. She assured me, “You can just let vegetables cook themselves and gently stir them all together.” The word “ratatouille” is related to the word touiller and the Latin tudiculare, meaning “to stir,” “crush,” or “toss.” After being cooked, the vegetables were originally assembled in a rectangular earthenware tian casserole, then gratinéed, and served hot or cold on the Sabbath. Now the cooked eggplant, pepper, zucchini, and tomato may be served together, or separately as individual salads. Ratatouille is similar to the Middle Eastern and North African dish tchoukchouka (see page 94), meaning “to shake up,” in both Hebrew and Arabic, and to other very old Mediterranean dishes of zucchini and eggplant. Hélène seasons her version with a hot but not fiery Basque pepper called piment d’Espelette, from Espelette, a town near her native Toulouse. If you don’t have piment d’Espelette, you can use hot paprika or New Mexico red chili powder.

Nothing tastes so good to me as the intense flavor of a fresh tomato, picked at the height of summer, cooked down and seasoned with fresh parsley, garlic, and olive oil. This recipe exemplifies southern-French vegetable cooking at its best. I have served these tomatoes as an accompaniment to roast lamb (see page 234) or, in the summer, as a scrumptious first course. They are also great with lox, bagels, and cream cheese to break the fast of Yom Kippur.

This couscous dish, originally made especially by Moroccans at the Maimouna, a post-Passover celebration, has become pan–North African in France now that Tunisians and Algerians are preparing it. They also make this dish, using butter and accompanying it with yogurt, at Shavuot, a late-spring holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai and the abundance of milk in the springtime. Sweet couscous can be made with either couscous or rice, although I prefer the texture of the couscous with the raisins and nuts.

People often ask me what kind of latkes were eaten before potatoes came to the Old World from the New. This onion pancake gives us a taste of that past. Buckwheat, called farine aux Sarrazins or blé noir in French, is used for this recipe. Although rendered goose fat was traditionally the oil used in Alsace and elsewhere in Europe, oils made from safflower, walnuts, and other nuts and seeds were also used, probably pressed by the farmers who brought them to markets where they were sold. The recipe, although attributed as Alsatian in one cookbook, is clearly from eastern Europe, as the word “gretchenes” means buckwheat in Polish.

“I was lucky during the war,” Albert Jacobs, a tiny man whose personality belied his stature, told me at his home in Ingwiller. “When war broke out, I was eighteen years old and was mobilized into the French army. I left Ingwiller with my knapsack on my back, marching in the middle of the road. My beret and wooden shoes gave me the air of youth.” Instead of taking the train he was supposed to take, he and his comrades had a picnic and took the following one. As luck would have it, the Germans bombed the first train. Later, when it got dangerous for the Jews in the army, Monsieur Jacobs had to go into hiding. “Here too I was lucky,” he told me. “An old grandmother who owned eight farms let me stay with her. She never told anybody that I was there.” Until he was almost ninety, Monsieur Jacobs dressed up three days a week, drove his car slowly into town, and ate lunch at the Cheval Blanc, where he also often dined with the local priest. “Everybody knows that I don’t eat pork,” he told me shortly before his death. When I asked him why he didn’t move to a larger city, like Strasbourg, his response was quick: “Here I am someone, and there I would be just an old Jew.” At Monsieur Jacobs’s home, a virtual museum of Alsatian Jewish history, the jewels were the old cookbooks in the attic and basement libraries. The books contained some handwritten recipes and were those of his late wife. “Books were her life,” he said. She collected all the old recipes from her mother, who lived with them until she died at ninety-five. When I looked through her handwritten book, I saw recipes like grimserle, which I know as krimsel or chremslach, a Passover fritter with nuts and raisins (which I wrote about in Jewish Cooking in America), schaleth (see page 251), cou d’oie farci (stuffed goose neck), gemarti supp (see page 76), and this grumbeerekugel, a potato kugel with onions, eggs, and soaked bread—all humble dishes of country Jews who used the food that was available. In the old days, they cooked with goose, chicken, or veal fat. In the recipe that follows, I have substituted vegetable oil or butter for those not serving a meat meal, and I often mix the potatoes with celeriac and sometimes cooked peas or green beans. By microwaving the grated potatoes for a minute, I cut down the cooking time from 2 1/2 hours to 45 minutes. This kugel is crisp and very delicious.

Bosc pears and Italian blue plums (dried for use in the winter) are fruits that were most often put into kugel. This very old Alsatian Sabbath kugel uses leftover bread that is soaked in water, squeezed to remove any excess moisture, and then mixed with the dried or fresh fruit and left to stew in the oven overnight. Some, like this version, include onions, which add a savory dimension to the sweetness of the fruit and the dough. I love this dish, which I serve in my home for Rosh Hashanah and the Sabbath as a side dish with brisket.