Onion

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On a late-june evening, I entered a courtyard in the Fifth Arrondissement, right near the picturesque Rue Mouffetard, one of my favorite streets in Paris when I was a student there so many years ago. Beyond the courtyard, I found myself in a large garden in front of an apartment building. After climbing two flights of stairs, I arrived at the home of Irving Petlin, an American artist, and his beautiful wife, Sarah. The two expats have lived here on and off since 1959. Sarah frequents the local markets, going to the Place Monge for her onions and garlic, making sure she visits her potato man from North Africa. Having chosen peonies for the table, she arranged them in a vase next to a big bowl of ripe cherries, making her table, with the Panthéon in the background, as beautiful as a perfectly orchestrated still life. At the meal, I especially liked the soup, which calls for lettuce leaves—a good way, I thought, of using up the tougher outer leaves that most of us discard, but which still have a lot of flavor. The French have a long tradition of herb- and- salad soup, something Americans should be increasingly interested in, given all the new wonderful greens we’re growing in our backyards and finding at farmers’ markets. I often replace the zucchini with eggplant and substitute other herbs that are available in my summer garden. This soup is also delicious served warm in the winter.

This Sri Lankan sambol may best be described as an accompanying salad or relish to be served at curry meals. You can make it as hot as you like.

Indians love raw onion rings with their kebabs, just as Americans like a slice of onion with their hamburgers. Browned meat and raw onions—it is a marriage made in heaven. The Indian rings are different, though. They are made from smaller onions and are cut paper thin. To temper the sharpness, they are soaked in cold water and dried off thoroughly in a towel. The rings separate, leaving a mound of tangled rings.

A delicious pilaf that may be served with most Indian meals.

There was a time when the easy-to-use canned chickpeas came in such a tin-tasting liquid that they needed not only draining but rinsing as well. The liquid was unusable. Lately, I have found canned organic chickpeas that are in a lovely natural liquid, quite similar to what I get when I boil my own. This is a giant leap, indeed. Look for them. The chickpeas may be served with Indian flatbreads or rice. Eggplants, greens, and relishes would complete the meal. Meats may always be added.

Here is an everyday dish with a fair number of ingredients. Once you have them all prepared and assembled, the rest is fairly easy. Remember that you can chop the onions in a food processor. I have used two 15-ounce cans of organic chickpeas, draining them to separate the liquid so I can measure it. If you are not using organic canned chickpeas, use water instead of the can liquid. If the can liquid is not enough, add water to get the correct amount. Serve with Indian or Middle Eastern breads (you can even roll up the chickpeas inside them) with Yogurt Sambol with Tomato and Shallot, page 249, on the side. At a dinner, add meat and a vegetable.