Tarte à la Rhubarbe Alsacienne

“I’m not much of a cook,” Michèle Weil told me as she ushered me into her charming kitchen in a residential section of Strasbourg. Fresh basil was growing on her kitchen windowsill, and paintings from the Jewish School of Paris adorned the walls. “But,” she continued, “I have to cook. All French women cook.” A full-time pediatrician and the mother of three boys, Michèle is smart enough to know she can’t do it all. On medical call before we arrived for dinner, she quickly pulled from the freezer a package of hunks of frozen salmon and cod, bought at Picard Surgelés. Then she boiled some potatoes, put the fish in the oven, and opened a carton of prepared Hollandaise sauce, which she microwaved and poured over the baked fish. Putting this together with a green salad with tomatoes and her homemade vinaigrette, she had made a quick and balanced dinner. Like all working women, Michèle has to make compromises. “My mother would never have given you frozen food,” she apologized. “But, no matter how busy I am, I would never buy desserts. I always make them,” she told me as she presented a free-form rhubarb tart that she had made before going to work. It seemed that every Jewish cook I visited in Alsace served me rhubarb, the sour-tasting sign of spring. Unlike Americans, who almost always marry tart rhubarb with strawberries and lace the two with large quantities of sugar, French cooks make a less sweet tart using only rhubarb. They peel the stalks first, which I do not. I think it might be one of those French fetishes, like always serving radishes with butter, or tomato juice with celery salt. Alsatian home cooks also serve their tart with a delicious custard topping made from cream and eggs.