Weeknight Meals

It is common knowledge that Jews should usher in the Sabbath with a little bit of fish. But in the village in Poland from which Danielle’s mother hailed, they often could not get carp in the winter, because the lake was frozen. The story goes that the Jews thought they could make an arrangement with God to create falshe fish (Yiddish for “fake fish”). So they made meat patties, shaped in ovals or balls, depending on the family tradition, and simmered them in a broth with salt, sugar, pepper, and a little carrot, so they would look and taste like sweet-and-sour gefilte fish. “Because the intentions were good, the benevolent God agreed with the Jews and said that he would make believe that it was fish,” said Danielle. (In this recipe, sugar is used as a seasoning, as it was in past centuries.)

The cookbook cited above includes several recipes for roast duck and sweet red cherries, the variety that grows in Alsace being Reverchon or Coeur de Pigeon (Pigeon’s Heart). I use Bing or Montmorency cherries, and you can also substitute peaches or rhubarb. If using rhubarb, just increase the amount of sugar to taste. I use cherries with pits, because they add more flavor, but remember to warn your guests!

When Céline Bénitah cooks this dish, she blanches the olives for a minute to get rid of the bitterness, a step that I never bother with. If you keep the pits in, just warn your guests in order to avoid any broken teeth! Céline also uses the marvelous Moroccan spice mixture ras el hanout, which includes, among thirty other spices, cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, cloves, and paprika. You can find it at Middle Eastern markets or through the Internet, or you can use equal amounts of the above spices or others that you like. To make my life easier, I assemble the spice rub the day before and marinate the chicken overnight. The next day, before my guests arrive, I fry the chicken and simmer it.

This Jewish-style stewed chicken comes from Gastronomie Pratique, a cookbook published in 1907 by Ali-Bab. Born Henri Babinski to Polish Christian immigrants to France, he was by profession a mining engineer, but he loved to cook and travel. Using the pseudonym Ali-Bab, he wrote the book for fun and included a long description of kosher cuisine as well as two Jewish recipes, one for choucroute, and one for poulet à la juive. Basically, he’s making a pot-au-feu, substituting chicken for beef and using fresh rendered chicken fat or veal-kidney suet. Since he finishes the dish off with butter, a no-no in kosher cooking, I have omitted this step. When serving this, I sometimes remove the skin and bones from the chicken for a more refined dish. I pile the chicken over white rice and spoon the gravy on top. Others, who like the meat on the bone, serve it as is. Sometimes called poule au bouillon or poule au pot, it is a comfort dish, and one often served in France for Friday night dinner or for the meal before the fast of Yom Kippur.

In the heart of Dijon, at the Municipal Museum, right next door to the majestic stone kitchen of the dukes of Burgundy, Alette Lévy checks coats. Once the owner of Dijon’s only kosher butcher shop, she talks food between customers, such as this chicken-tagine recipe she makes for her French friends. The trick to this recipe is to put the almonds in the microwave for 3 minutes, to make them crackly. This way you don’t run the risk of burning them, the way I always seem to do when I forget them in the oven or frying pan. Alette told me you can substitute lamb for the chicken.

When I was in Bordeaux, I received a call from Yaël Nahon, a young woman in public relations who loves to cook. We decided to meet at the Place des Quinconces, a beautiful square near the harbor with shimmering water where children play in the summer. In her spare time she is trying to re-create the dishes of her mother and grandmother, who came from Oran, in Algeria. Like many other North Africans, she uses spigol (an Algerian spice combination of hot pepper, saffron, and cumin, now packaged in Marseille) to enhance the flavor of her chicken dishes. This is a dish Yael ate every Friday night of her childhood. It was always preceded by several salads and followed by cookies and fruit.

Sweetly glazed and flavored with preserved lemons, this chicken, a recipe from Irene Weil, brings a Moroccan flavor to a classic French roasted chicken. Recipes like this represent the new France, with its influences from all over the world. Irene, married to a Frenchman for more than thirty years, was born in the United States to parents who came from Vienna. Even though she raised her children in France, she still has an American sense of adventure in her cooking.

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.

Raïto, also spelled Raite or Rayte, is a very old sauce, traditionally served by Provençal Jews on Friday night over cod, either simply grilled or baked. Some people add a small whole fresh or canned anchovy, a few sprigs of fennel, and/or about 1/4 cup of chopped walnuts or almonds. Similar in taste to a puttanesca sauce, it can also be served over grilled tuna or pasta.

This delightful jewish recipe adapted from one by the famous Provençal food writer Jean-Noël Escudier in his La Véritable Cuisine Provençale et Niçoise uses matzo meal to coat the trout, which is stuffed with spinach and sorrel, or, if you like, Swiss chard. Trout was and still is found in ponds on private property in Provence and throughout France. This particular recipe is served at Passover by the Jews of Provence.

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.

While in Nice, I had lunch with Irene and Michel Weil at their charming house, with fig trees growing in their garden and nasturtiums on their deck. Although Irene quietly confessed to me that she wasn’t much of a cook, she treated us to a delectable and creative meal. It began with the last tomatoes from their garden served with a little olive oil, sea salt, and a sprinkling of fresh herbs, including mint, basil, and cilantro, from her garden; then we had a Mediterranean dorade royale (sea bream) with preserved lemons, tamarind, and ginger. Comté cheese brought from Michel’s native Besançon, fresh pomegranate seeds from the yellow pomegranates growing in their garden, raspberries, and fresh walnuts in the shell finished the meal, all attractively presented as only the French can do. When I asked about the seasonings for the dorade, Irene said that she loves the flavor contrasts of the preserved lemon, tamarind, and ginger.

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.’ ”

The slight tartness of sorrel and the richness of salmon are two flavors that Jews have always loved in their cooking. Eastern European Jews eat cold sorrel soup, which they call tchav; Greek Jews eat a tart rhubarb-and-spinach sauce over fish, and French Jews are drawn to Pierre Troisgros’s now classic salmon with sorrel sauce. Pierre told me that this seminal, simple, and delicious recipe came about because he had grown an abundance of sorrel and had to do something with it. With its subtle interplay of tartness and creaminess, this dish is sometimes made with kosher white wine and vermouth for Jewish weddings held at the restaurant.

Every year at passover, I make too much gefilte fish. In fact, when I made gefilte fish one year with Jackie Lyden on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, I used 27 pounds of fish! Hadassa Schneerson Carlebach, a fascinating woman (see page 140) who worked with her late father making and providing matzo and other kosher food for observant Jews in detention camps in France, gave me this recipe for gefilte-fish-stuffed cabbage. Flavored with slowly cooked peppers and tomatoes, it is a great way to use up leftover patties. Even avowed gefilte-fish detesters love this dish. A cooking tip: I put the cabbage in the freezer for two days, defrost it for a day, and then use the limp leaves to wrap the fish.

Carp, originally from China, were unknown west of the Rhine until the middle decades of the thirteeth century, when the French started farming fish in ponds. They used holding tanks for live storage in a world without refrigeration or canning methods and in areas that had no access to the sea. Said to have been brought to France by Jews, carp became the most popular fish in Europe during the Middle Ages, and the Sabbath fish par excellence for the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, in eastern France. Carpe à la juive, or “carp in the Jewish style,” as described above in C. Asserolette’s charming “letters” to a friend in which she recounted watching the preparations for a Rosh Hashanah dinner in an Alsatian home in Paris, is poached in advance and served cold. The evolution of the sauces used for this weekly fish reflects the culinary and cultural continuity of the Jewish people. In medieval France and southern Germany two sauces were very popular: the sweet-and-sour sauce (see preceding recipe) and this green parsley sauce, still used today in many homes at Passover. The green sauce is a simple one, often made with ginger, parsley, bread crumbs, and vinegar. Today few people in France except Jews use carp, since there are so many more poissons nobles (noble fish), as one Frenchman told me. Whatever fish you choose—carp, grouper, salmon, sea bream, pike, or cod—you can, for ease of preparation, use fillets or slice the fish into steaks, cook them on a bed of sautéed onions, then poach them in water and wine. When they are done, you may reduce the cooking liquid and pour it over the fish slices, arranged on a platter to resemble the whole fish, and serve the dish cold or at room temperature.

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.

This is a recipe that Natan Holchaker, an avid cook, makes in Bordeaux. In a take on the classic frisée and lardons, Natan uses duck instead of the prohibited pork. I have found that in France even the most secular French Jews avoid pork, substituting smoked duck instead. You can also substitute turkey bacon or kosher beef fry (akin to pastrami).

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.

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.