Poultry

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.

This is one of the down-to-earth recipes Baroness Rothschild loves. When I made the dish for a friend, he said that, like stuffed cabbage, this Bohemian chicken recipe tasted better on the second day. Holding it only enhances the flavor, making it a perfect dish for Shabbat.

Sandrine Weil and Mathias Laurent represent to me how France has changed in a generation. Their apartment at the time, overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, was very modern, very relaxed. With three young girls, they didn’t care if everything was in order, and the place had a wonderful warm feeling of welcoming chaos. On one special Shabbat, Mathias was the cook, and gave me a present of a meal with truffles. After the blessings were recited over the wine and the challah, made by Sandrine and her daughters, we tasted scrambled eggs with truffles as a first course, followed by an extraordinary dish of chicken with truffles stuffed under the skin, called in French poularde demi-deuil (chicken in half-mourning), and truffled gelato for dessert. Here is Mathias’s recipe for roast chicken. Since truffles are rare and expensive, I often instead scatter around the chicken some carrots, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, green beans, or whatever is seasonally available. It is delicious, and a snap to prepare. If you are lucky enough to have a truffle, however, omit the rosemary, thyme, and preserved lemon the night before, and carefully slide a small, sharp knife under the skin of the chicken, separating the skin from the meat. Then cut the truffle into six to eight thin slices and slide them under the skin. Leave in the refrigerator overnight. Continue with the roasting as I describe below.

While her husband was on a fall Sunday ramble with friends, Anne-Juliette Belicha gave me a cooking lesson in their fifteenth-century house overlooking the fields in the Dordogne countryside. The house is located on the outskirts of Montagnac, right near the caves of Lascaux, renowned for their prehistoric animal paintings. In the kitchen hang photos of the woman who owned the house at the turn of the century, who tended geese for foie gras and to provide goose fat for the winter. Because quinces were in season, Anne-Juliette decided to cook us one of her Algerian husband’s beloved Rosh Hashanah dishes, from a book that is also one of my favorites—150 Recettes et Mille et Un Souvenirs d’une Juive d’Algerie by Léone Jaffin. The quince, believed to be the Biblical “apple” of the Garden of Eden by some scholars, is a complex fruit. Hard to peel and quarter, quinces require careful handling. Once peeled, they darken rather quickly, so you need to keep them in water mixed with a little lemon juice. Anne-Juliette picked the quinces from a friend’s tree and used an old variety of onions—a cross between onions and shallots—that she bought at a nearby farmers’ market. As she cooked, first frying the onions and then the kosher chickens that she buys in Paris, she told us about her dream: to open a kosher bed-and-breakfast in the Dordogne.

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).

Here is Paul Bocuse’s kosher rendition of his famous soup with black truffles and foie gras. He first created it for a dinner in 1975 at the Élysée Palace (the White House of France) when he received the Légion d’Honneur from President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing for valor on the battlefield during World War II. I have omitted the fresh foie gras, because obtaining it both fresh and kosher is difficult. This soup is refreshingly delicious, one you can prepare ahead that will still make a grand splash at any dinner. Either make one big soup or use eight 8-ounce ramekins, as the recipe indicates.

This Tunisian holiday chicken soup that Yael calls consommé nikitouche is filled with little dumplings that have become so popular in France because of the growing Tunisian population. Nikitouches, similar in size to Israeli couscous, are today prepackaged. When presenting this recipe for her blog, Yael wrote, “It is winter; you are feeling feverish. Nothing replaces the nikitouche soup of our grandmothers.” Here it is. Just remember that you must start the recipe two nights ahead.

Chef Daniel Rose starts his day in the kitchen at 7:30 a.m. He begins with the chicken broth, first browning chicken wings, then adding a wine reduction, and then water, leeks, and other aromatics, but never carrots. “This isn’t the way my grandmother would have done it,” Daniel told me. “But we don’t want so much sweetness in our soup.” He doesn’t bother with a bouquet garni: “I just stick the herbs in the pot.” Freeze any broth that you don’t use right away.

The elegant Gilbert Simon invited me for tea in her beautiful apartment in Nîmes, a city in the south of France dating back to the Roman Empire. Born in Lyon, Madame Simon, who is in her late eighties, married a Jewish “Nîmois” whom she met at a dance. But then the Nazis came in 1942 and started taking Jewish families away. “We left before they could find us,” she told me. “They were searching for my husband because he was a doctor here, working in the Resistance.” When they left Nîmes, the Simons hid in the mountains. “We found a house to live in with our two little girls. The peasants sold us vegetables; sometimes they killed a lamb; they brought us cheese and butter. When we returned to Nîmes, it was very difficult. There were not very many Jews left.” Today the majority of Jews are Sephardic, having immigrated to Nîmes in the 1960s from North Africa. Thinking back to happier and more prosperous times, this is the pâté she made through the years for her own family on Friday nights and the holidays, as well as for Jewish students who stayed with her while studying in Nîmes or nearby Aix-en-Provence.

Michel and Françoise Kalifa met over a slab of meat. “When I looked at Françoise, I saw only goodness in her eyes,” said Michel, a butcher who has a flowing black mustache. “She had a generosity of heart.” The two met in Michel’s butcher shop on Rue des Écouffes, in the Marais. Françoise’s parents came to the Marais after the Second World War, looking for other Jews from Poland who had survived the Nazi occupation. “They all said they would meet in the Pletzl, as the quarter was called,” Françoise, a caterer, told me. Now she and Michel, who is from Morocco, live in an apartment above their store with their baby. When we arrived at their renovated apartment, located in an old courtyard, a large platter of the charcuterie that Michel had prepared for us was on the table in the living room. “You should eat with your eyes first,” Michel told us. I picked up a thin slice of turkey smoked with beech wood: moist, mellow, and subtle in flavor. As I tasted my way through the platter, I learned to recognize the various flavors that regional differences make in charcuterie. And now that so many butchers, like Michel, are coming from North Africa, regional products like merguez lamb or beef sausage with its harissa-infused flavor are becoming butcher-shop staples. One of Françoise’s amazing specialties is this chopped liver from her Polish family. “On my mother’s side, we add onions to almost everything we eat,” Françoise told me. Not as finely chopped as most American versions, her liver was laced with finely sautéed sweet onions browned in duck fat and cooked until a caramel color. “The onions are the real secret,” Michel added. “They give it the sweet taste.” Although the Kalifas wouldn’t reveal the recipe, food historians Philip and Mary Hyman, who accompanied me, helped me get close, we believe.

The Parsi community of India is of Persian descent. When the Parsis fled Iran in the tenth century, they settled on India’s west coast, where they managed to preserve not only their religious traditions—they are Zoroastrians—but many of their culinary traditions as well. This delicately sweet-and-sour dish of chicken cooked with dried apricots is part of that tradition. I have a Parsi friend who puts in a healthy glug of Madeira toward the end of the cooking. Parsis picked up many customs not only from their Gujarati neighbors but also from their neighbors and masters in nineteenth-century Bombay, the British. This dish is generally served with a mountain of very fine, crisp potato straws—you can just buy a large packet of them—but may also be served with rice.

Here I have taken a Pakistani recipe for stir-fried liver made in the wok-like karhai and changed it just enough so Westerners, who like their liver softer and pinker than South Asians do, may enjoy it too. If you want the Pakistani recipe, after the liver has browned, cut it crossways into 1-inch squares and add these pieces to the onion sauce when it is ready. Continue to stir and cook on low heat until the liver is done to your satisfaction. Serve with rice and a salad or a green vegetable.

These duck breasts are not cooked in a tandoor, and not even in an oven, but they do taste like tandoor-baked poultry, hence their name. I marinate them in the same manner that I would a tandoori chicken, then I quickly pan-fry them so they stay a little rare inside. They take just minutes to cook. As for the skin, which is flabby if not crisped to perfection—well, I just remove it entirely. I like to serve this duck with Sri Lankan Rice with Cilantro and Lemon Grass and Swiss Chard with Ginger and Garlic.

South Asians love their quail, which is generally brought home by hunters. I know that when the men in our family returned from their winter shoots, what I most looked forward to eating were not the larger creatures, the deer and the geese, but the smaller ones, the duck, partridge, and quail. Here is a quick, stir-fried (bhuna implies stirring and browning) version of a dish I had in Lahore, Pakistan. This recipe may be easily doubled. Use a very large frying pan if you do so. When eating quail—and you have to use your fingers—it is hard to think of any other food, even though rice, vegetables, other meats, and legumes are nearly always part of the meal.

Chappali kebabs, popular throughout much of Pakistan but originating near its borders with Afghanistan, are beef patties shallow-fried in the fat rendered from the tail of a fat-tailed sheep. If you can imagine a juicy, spicy hamburger cooked in roast beef drippings, you get a general idea: delicious but iffy on the health front. So over the years, I have come up with my own version, a turkey kebab. I serve these kebabs with Thin Raw Onion Rings and the local Peshawari Red Pepper Chutney. You may even put this kebab in a hamburger bun, along with the onion rings and either a good squirt of lemon juice or some tomato ketchup.

A gentle, family-style curry. If you leave out the cayenne pepper, this may even be served to small children, along with rice and perhaps Corn with Aromatic Seasonings.

Vindaloo implies garlic and vinegar, and this dish certainly has plenty of both. Make it as hot as you like. The heat balances the tartness. This dish holds well and, because it does not have too much sauce, is wonderful to take on picnics.

This is an oven-cooked version of the Indian classic Murgh Mussallam—a whole chicken cooked in a rich spicy sauce. Although Indians like their chicken skinned, partly to let the spices penetrate better, I have not bothered too much with that in this book, just to make life easier. But it would be good to do it for this recipe, as this is a dish for special occasions. You can ask your butcher to skin the chicken, but it is really not difficult to yank most of it off yourself. The wings are a bit troublesome, so I just leave them alone. I might go to town here and serve Black Beans, Yellow Basmati Rice with Sesame Seeds, and Sweet-and-Sour Eggplant. On the other hand, you could treat this as a spicy roast and just have parsley potatoes and fresh summer peas!

This dish may also be made with ground lamb, or, for that matter, with ground beef. When using turkey, make sure your butcher includes both light and dark meat. White meat alone will be very dry. In Hyderabad, in the very center of South India, this keema (the Indian word for ground meat) is typically served at Sunday brunches with khichri (the dish of rice and split peas from which the British kedgeree was derived; see Rice with Moong Dal, page 213), pappadom for crunch, and pickles for pizzazz. Store-bought Indian pickles such as mango, lemon, or chili will do, but if you prefer, a sweeter preserved chutney would be just fine.