Gemarti Supp

I love gemarti supp, or selbst gemarti supp, which means “homemade soup” in the local Alsatian dialect. Unbeknownst to most Alsatians, this is an ancient Jewish recipe, as its name reveals. Selbst means “myself ” in German, but gemarti is a Hebrew word meaning “I have completed.” So this delectable mushroom soup thickened with semolina flour is named “I made it myself.” I found this simple recipe at a tiny Jewish museum (Musée Judéo-Alsacien de Bouxwiller) in Alsace. Similar to potage bonne femme, the broth is thickened with a roux made of oil or goose fat and semolina or barley, a common thickening technique brought to the United States and especially to Louisiana by Alsatian immigrants, including many Jews. “We’d take the leeks out of the ground at the end of summer,” recalled Jean Joho, the renowned Alsace- born chef and proprietor of Everest, Brasserie Jo, and Eiffel Tower Restaurant in Chicago. “We would keep them fresh in sand in the root cellar so that we would have them all winter.” In the Middle Ages, people believed that everything that grew in the soil, including mushrooms and truffles, was from the devil. Potatoes at first went into that category, but by the first half of the eighteenth century, potatoes, introduced in about 1673 by Turkish Jews, were well established in France, and this recipe changed. Little by little, gemarti supp, with its marriage of mushrooms and leeks, became almost extinct when the mixture of leek, potatoes, and cream became so popular.