Root Vegetable

If anything is typical of Alsace, it is tarte flambée, a pizzalike flat bread covered with runny white and tangy cheese (a thin mixture of farmer’s cheese, crème fraîche, heavy cream, and fromage blanc or Gruyère, depending on your preference) and a sprinkling of diced onions and lardons. Dating back hundreds of years, tarte flambée is served everywhere in Alsace, with connoisseurs arguing about their favorite versions. In the old days, the farmers would take leftover bread dough, roll it out paperthin, spread some heavy cream mixed with egg over it, scatter some lardons or ham and onions on top, put it in a hot, wood-burning oven, and—voilà!—dinner was ready. The tradition still stands today, and tarte flambée is particularly enjoyed accompanied by a green salad as a simple Sunday night dinner. At the end of a late Sunday afternoon in April, I was driving Yves Alexandre, a traveling salesman who loves to cook, near fields resplendent with signs of spring—white asparagus and rhubarb, and yellow rapeseed flowers (more commonly known in the United States as the flowers that produce canola). We stopped at Le Marronnier, a charming winstub in Stutzheim, a little town about ten miles from Strasbourg. It was here that I tasted my first tarte flambée. Most of the patrons were seated at outdoor tables in the cobblestoned courtyard with wisteria climbing over the brick walls. A marronnier, a sprawling chestnut tree, stood smack in the center of the patio. “You have to eat the tart hot,” Yves told me as tarts were being rushed to tables near us. The two Mauritian tarte-flambée bakers make a few hundred every Sunday, with a topping of farmer’s cheese and crème fraîche. This Jewish version, with leftover challah dough as a base, of course omits the ham or bacon. At Passover, Yves told me, some Alsatian Jews use matzo for their Sunday night tarte flambée.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chicken flavored with fennel and garlic is a very Jewish Friday night dish, one eaten by Rashi and his family in the eleventh century. I have found recipes for it in many historical cookbooks, but the inspiration for this version was a particularly tasty one from the late Richard Olney, who lived in Provence. There is something very comforting about the long-simmered fennel and garlic topped by the sautéed chicken.

One morning, as my editor, Judith Jones, and I were wandering around the streets of Strasbourg looking for a cell-phone store, I bumped into three young men having a smoke outside a restaurant. I saw “Crocodile” written on their chefs’ jackets and asked if Emil Jung, the chef-owner and a friend of a friend, was in the restaurant. They said he was and told me just to go knock on the door to say hello. We did; three hours later, we left the restaurant having been wined and dined beautifully by him and his lovely wife, Monique. One of their Alsatian specialties is fish choucroute (sauerkraut) with heavenly beurre-blanc sauce, a dish appreciated by customers who follow the laws of kashrut. In Strasbourg, where everybody eats sauerkraut, there is even a Choucrouterie theater and restaurant built on an old sauerkraut factory. Roger Siffert, the affable director of this bilingual (Alsatian dialect and French) cabaret theater, says that they serve seven varieties of choucroute, including fish for observant Jews. “With words like pickelfleisch and shmatteh existing in both Yiddish and Alsatian,” said Siffert, “people should reach out to what is similar, not separate. In Alsace we call Jews ‘our Jews.’ ”

According to the Talmud and the French sage Rashi, beets, fish, and cloves of garlic are essential foods to honor the Sabbath. French Jews also use horseradish, sliced as a root or ground into a sauce, and served at Passover to symbolize the bitterness of slavery. It was probably in Alsace or southern Germany that the horseradish root replaced the bitter greens of more southerly climes as the bitter herbs at Passover dinner. For hundreds of years, local farmers would dig up horseradish roots and peel and grate them outdoors, by their kitchens, making sure to protect their eyes from the sting. Then they would mix the root with a little sugar and vinegar and sometimes grated beets, keeping it for their own personal use or selling it at local farmers’ markets. In 1956, Raifalsa, an Alsace-based company, began grating horseradish grown by the area’s farmers in the corner of a farm in Mietesheim, near the Vosges Mountains. A few years ago, Raifalsa, still the only manufacturer of prepared horseradish in France, agreed to produce a batch of kosher horseradish. They had the rabbi of Strasbourg come to the factory to supervise the operation, which resulted in the production of six thousand 7-ounce pots, all stamped with a certification from the Grand Rabbinat de Strasbourg. Before grating the horseradish, just remember to open a window and put on a pair of goggles.

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.

On a recent visit to the Marais, I stopped in at Florence Finkelsztajn’s Traiteur Delicatessen, as I always do. The quarter has two Finkelsztajn delicatessens, one trimmed in yellow (Florence’s ex-husband’s) and one in blue (Florence’s—now renamed Kahn). According to Gilles Pudlowski, the gastronomic critic of Polish Jewish origin who writes the popular Pudlo restaurant guides, Florence’s store is the best place to satisfy a nostalgic craving for eastern European cooking. In addition to Central European Yiddish specialties, like herring, chopped liver, and pastrami, Florence also sells Pudlo, baked in the back of the shop. I have made her recipe, which she gave me a few years ago, and I can assure you it is delicious. Pletzl, short for Bialystoker tsibele pletzl, refers to a circular eastern European flat onion bread, often studded with poppy seeds, that came from the city of Bialystok, Poland. The bread is known in America in a smaller version as the bialy. Try it as a snack hot from the oven, or make a “big pletzl sandwich,” as Florence does. Her fillings vary as much as the different ethnicities of Jews living in Paris today: Alsatian pickelfleisch (corned beef), Romanian pastrami, Russian eggplant caviar (see page 34), North African roasted peppers, and French tomato and lettuce.

At a recent Kiddush after a Bat Mitzvah service in France, the wine was French, unlike the sweet wine usually served at American synagogues. The food was elegantly prepared, as only the French can do it: spread out on a large table were thin slices of smoked salmon on toast, eggplant rolled and filled with goat cheese, a North African sautéed-pepper salad, squash soup served in tiny cups, and celery-root rémoulade. If you have never eaten celery-root salad, then start now! And if you’ve never made mayonnaise before, it’s an exhilarating and rewarding experience that I highly recommend. Any leftover mayonnaise can be kept in a jar in the refrigerator for a few days.

When Alexander Zbirou came to France from Tunisia in 1966 to study marketing, there were few good kosher restaurants in Paris. In 1976, he opened a French restaurant, called Au Rendezvous/La Maison du Couscous, in the Eighth Arrondissement near the Champs-Élysées. Four years later, he turned it into a kosher Tunisian restaurant, the only one of its kind in the quarter. Today, there are more than thirty-eight in the Eighth Arrondisement. “I saw Jews arriving in the quarter,” he told me over lunch at his restaurant. “They came, and I was waiting for them. It was home cooking for Tunisians and Ashkenazim. After all, there are lots of mixed marriages here in France.” In 1988, his mother, Jeanne Zbirou, immigrated to Paris, and is now directing the cooking in the kitchen. Well into her eighties, she comes to the restaurant every day to work with her son. His restaurant, although technically kosher, does not close on Friday night or Saturday. “I feel that we are rendering a service to kosher clientele, to give them a kosher meal for the Sabbath,” he said. Other restaurants, under the supervision of the Parisian rabbinical authority, the Beth Din, are either closed for the Sabbath or open only to customers who pay in advance. Sitting down at the restaurant, we were first served an array of kemia, similar to the ubiquitous mezze at Arab restaurants. We began with flaky brik, filled with potatoes, parsley, and hard-boiled eggs (see page 30). At least a dozen salads followed, served on tiny plates, all brimming with bold colors and flavors. Some of my favorites were raw artichoke slivers with harissa, oil, and onions; turnips with bitter orange; and this delicious carrot salad with harissa and caraway seeds. When I asked how much salt they used to cook the carrots, Jeanne said, “Enough salt to make a raw egg rise in water.” In my own kitchen, I prefer roasting the carrots, because it brings out the sweetness of the vegetable.

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.

When I visited my cousins in Annecy, they served me this unusual salad. Its variety of colors and textures is stunning. As with many other cooked salads, it tastes even better the next day, making it a great dish for dinner parties or picnics. The kosher dill pickles came from shopping trips to Geneva and were a big treat.

The seeds of cultivated fennel, like eggplant, are said to have been brought to France by Jews and other merchants. Of course, wild fennel grows everywhere in the south of France. I have tasted this salad in many North African French homes. It is very simple, and a lovely counterpoint to all the more elaborate salads of the North African tradition. Once the fennel and celery have begun to wilt a bit, the flavors all come together. If pomegranates are not in season, substitute dried cranberries or cherries.

Chef Daniel Rose (see page 68) served the following salad with brandade potato latkes (see page 308) at his Spring Restaurant during Hanukkah. The secret to this colorful winter salad is to keep the fennel very cold. This recipe, and all Daniel Rose’s recipes, may change according to the market and ses humeurs (the chef’s moods).

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.

When we were visiting Galimard, one of the perfume factories in Grasse, our guide was an adorable young French girl with huge hazel eyes named Cyrielle Charpentier. After we finished the tour, learning about the flowers from around Grasse that go into perfumes, Cyrielle let us try some of the essences. Noticing a chai, the Jewish symbol for “life,” on a chain around her neck, we asked her if she was Jewish, and she said that she was. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, and her mother, an Italian Jew who also suffered during the war, lived near Grasse. When I asked her what foods she liked, she immediately named her grandmother’s tchoukchouka, a North African dish with tomatoes, peppers, and sometimes eggplant. The purists’ versions of tchoukchouka, this salade cuite, include lots of garlic and no onions, but I have seen some with onions as well. The beauty of this delicious recipe is that it is prepared in advance and tastes even better the next day, especially helpful for the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays, when cooking is prohibited and there is little time to prepare food—you do not have to fuss with a last-minute salad. It can also be used as a base for an egg or sausage dish, and is great as a sauce over pasta.