Quick

At a recent Kiddush after a Bat Mitzvah service in France, the wine was French, unlike the sweet wine usually served at American synagogues. The food was elegantly prepared, as only the French can do it: spread out on a large table were thin slices of smoked salmon on toast, eggplant rolled and filled with goat cheese, a North African sautéed-pepper salad, squash soup served in tiny cups, and celery-root rémoulade. If you have never eaten celery-root salad, then start now! And if you’ve never made mayonnaise before, it’s an exhilarating and rewarding experience that I highly recommend. Any leftover mayonnaise can be kept in a jar in the refrigerator for a few days.

The seeds of cultivated fennel, like eggplant, are said to have been brought to France by Jews and other merchants. Of course, wild fennel grows everywhere in the south of France. I have tasted this salad in many North African French homes. It is very simple, and a lovely counterpoint to all the more elaborate salads of the North African tradition. Once the fennel and celery have begun to wilt a bit, the flavors all come together. If pomegranates are not in season, substitute dried cranberries or cherries.

Chef Daniel Rose (see page 68) served the following salad with brandade potato latkes (see page 308) at his Spring Restaurant during Hanukkah. The secret to this colorful winter salad is to keep the fennel very cold. This recipe, and all Daniel Rose’s recipes, may change according to the market and ses humeurs (the chef’s moods).

“I so miss Shabbat meals in France,” a young North African man from Marseille living in Washington told me when we were seated next to each other on a plane. “My mother never makes fewer than ten to fifteen salads.” One of these salads might be a combination of oranges and olives. It is very refreshing, and looks beautiful as one of many Moroccan salads. The black and orange colors remind me of black-eyed Susans. Prepared with argan oil, which comes from argan pits harvested from the argan tree, the salad is balanced with the oranges and grapefruit. These are all 2,000-year-old Moroccan flavors.

This classic french potato salad is very simple. A non-Jewish version might include lardons (a type of bacon) and shallots, but instead I use a tart mayonnaise. For a North African touch, you can add sliced hard-boiled eggs and cured black olives. I often add julienned basil with the parsley, or other compatible herbs.

This is a surprising and appealing melding of squash, coriander, and harissa that I tasted with couscous when I was recently in Paris. It is also served on Rosh Hashanah.

While attending a Catholic-Jewish wedding in Aussois, a quaint French alpine village near the Italian border, I wondered aloud to the bride’s uncle if this wasn’t the first time most of the villagers had ever met a Jew. In response, he told me this chilling story. During the Second World War, under the Italian occupation of France, 125 Jews were hidden in a house at the base of the town’s fortress, which was a confinement center. Villagers brought them a little bread and some potatoes to supplement their meager provisions. When the Italians left, the Jews were sure they were liberated and took a train home, only to run into German soldiers, who sent them all directly to Auschwitz. Even today, stories like this one are often hushed up because they are so painful to hear. Before the wedding ceremony, my husband and I sat down in a tiny café overlooking the mountains and tasted this salad with fresh lettuce, smoked salmon, tomatoes, and local walnut vinegar, a prized ingredient that I had never tasted but have since found on the Internet. Dill is such an important flavor in Jewish cooking that the French eleventh-century biblical commentator and Talmudic scholar Rashi wrote that if dill is used for flavor, a special blessing over the earth must be recited before tasting it. If, however, it is simply added to decorate the dish, it is not intended for food value, so just a general prayer over food must be recited.

This is one of the salads that I make frequently. For some reason, although people always ask me how I make it, I have never put the recipe in any of my cookbooks. Grilling the peppers softens the pulp and brings out the natural sweetness. Sometimes the peppers are mixed with eggplants and tomatoes in North African salads, such as the salade juive (recipe follows) or the tchoukchouka (see page 94). Sometimes they are served alone. For Rosh Hashanah and dinner parties, I love to serve the colorful combination of red peppers, carrot salad (see page 112), and roasted beet salad (see page 108).

The first time I tasted a simple French lettuce salad of greens tossed in a mustardy vinaigrette, I marveled at how uncomplicated and delicious it was. Presented after the main course, as is traditional in Europe, the lettuce dish cleanses the palate. In France, with its varied climate and wonderful produce, salad greens are in season all year long and have been eaten forever, both cooked and raw. Serve as is, or with chopped fresh basil, cilantro, dill, tarragon, or chives sprinkled on top. Tiny slices of radish are a nice addition and, according to the Talmud, help digest lettuce.

This is a very quick recipe, even quicker today because of Picard Surgelés, the French chain of grocery stores selling superb frozen food products. Although the vegetables are not certified kosher, even the Beth Din of Paris, the religious governance, approves of their use. I tasted this particular soup at a Shabbat dinner at the home of North African–born Sylviane and Gérard Lévy. Gérard, who is a well-known Chinese-antique dealer on Paris’s Left Bank, recited the prayer over the sweet raisin wine sipped on the Sabbath in French homes. Everyone then went into the next room for the ritual hand-washing. When they returned, Gérard said the blessing over the two challahs before enjoying the meat meal, which began with this creamy (but creamless) frozen-pea-and-tarragon soup.

I have always thought that the best part of fish soup is the rouille, a peppery, garlicky sauce that is slathered on toasted rounds of baguette and floated on the surface of the soup. I also like to stir some rouille into the broth. Similar to the Provençal aioli, a garlic-flavored mayonnaise, rouille is flavored with hot pepper and saffron, which give it its signature rust color. (Rouille literally means “rust” in French.) Today I have noticed that North African Jews often spice up their rouille even more, by adding a little harissa (see page 33) to it. Traditionally, a mortar and pestle are used to pound the garlic, pepper, and egg yolk, gradually incorporating the oil to make a mayonnaise. Today it is easy to put everything in a food processor and slowly add the oil, drop by drop. Leftover sauce is good on sandwiches or as a dip.

It was in Paris in the 1960s that I first tasted buckwheat blini. My friend Nanou took me to a tiny, chic Russian restaurant near the Champs- Élysées. Russians, many of them Jews, came to France at the end of the nineteenth century, not long before the Russian Revolution, and congregated in restaurants like this one. We ordered the elegantly presented blini, and ate them daintily with smoked salmon and crème fraîche. Twenty years after Nanou died, her son Édouard got married. The wedding party took place at Maxim’s, where we drank lots of champagne and danced until the wee hours of the morning. I was touched to taste blini with smoked salmon and crème fraîche, the same appetizer that Édouard’s mother and I had enjoyed so many years ago. For me, it was as though she were present at the wedding. This recipe was adapted from Lynn Visson’s The Russian Heritage Cookbook.

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.

Sometimes in the ninth century, or perhaps earlier, Baltic fishermen figured out that curing herring in salt would preserve it. Caught and immediately salted to prevent spoilage, the fish was then brought back to French ports to be sold, often by Jewish purveyors who transported it up the Rhône. Salting fish was so important in the medieval period that salt-fish mongers, like fresh-fish mongers, had their own stores for salted, dried, and brined fish such as herring and cod. Because the fish had not in fact been cooked, rabbis considered salted fish to be kosher even if it had been salted by gentiles. For centuries Jews in northern France, who couldn’t eat pork, ate herring as their daily protein. It was prepared in a variety of ways, most often first soaked in milk to remove the excess saltiness, then dressed with vinegar and oil, and served with lots of sliced raw onion and hot boiled potatoes. Jews in France have put a French touch on their herring dishes, serving them as an appetizer rather than as a main course. They usually prepare the herring with either a horseradish sauce with apples, hard-boiled eggs, and beets, or a mustard-dill sauce with sugar, cream, and vinegar. To break the fast of Yom Kippur, Alsatian Jews use a sweet-and-sour cream sauce with their herring.

Hélène Sancy’s Haroset recipe goes back to her family’s residence in Portugal before the Inquisition. It is probably one of the oldest existing haroset recipes in France today, if not the oldest. Her husband’s job is to grind the fruits and nuts with the brass mortar and pestle, which they inherited, handed down through the generations. Although the Sancys do not roll their haroset into balls as is called for in other old recipes from Spain and Portugal (recipe follows), they have another fascinating Passover custom. First they say a blessing over the bitter herbs (maror)—in their case, romaine lettuce—as a reminder of slavery in Egypt. Then they wrap the romaine around parsley that has been dipped in salt water, a little chopped celery, and about a teaspoon of haroset. The Ashkenazi way, in contrast, is to sandwich bitter herbs and haroset between two pieces of matzo. Curiously, the Sancys’ recipe for haroset, in this land of vineyards in the southwest of France, includes no raisins.

The French call this appetizer caviar d’aubergine because the feel of the eggplant seeds on your tongue is similar in texture to that of fish eggs. A delicious and easy-to-prepare dish, it has been in the French Jewish repertoire since at least the turn of the last century, when Romanian immigrants introduced the French to their ways of grilling the eggplant with its dark skin intact, a technique learned in the Middle East via the Caucasus. At about the same time, Russian and Romanian immigrants also brought this so-called poor man’s caviar with them to France. Whereas earlier generations used a hand chopper to make this dish, often blending in either lemon juice and olive oil or tomatoes and green peppers, today most cooks pulse it in a food processor. Although it is easier to roast the eggplants in the oven, oven- roasting will not give you the smoky flavor that comes from grilling over an open flame. This is a recipe to play with. Add diced onion, cilantro, or paprika, if you wish, or a few tablespoons of grapefruit juice or even mayonnaise. I have tasted all kinds of eggplant caviar. The last was at a very upscale French Bat Mitzvah, where the eggplant, laced with pesto, spiced with cumin, and decorated with tiny pansies, was served in an eggshell at the Kiddush after the service.

A mixture of aromatic (and generally expensive) spices that according to the ancient Ayurvedic system of medicine are meant to heat the body. This is the only spice mixture that I ask you to make at home and keep in storage. Its aroma is unsurpassed if mixed and ground at home in small quantities. Also, it will not contain cheap “filler” spices, such as coriander seeds, as many commercial mixtures do. I do keep the store-bought mixture in my cupboard as well for use in certain dishes that require less perfume. My recipes will tell you which one to use.

At Le Monde Des Épices, I delight in seeing how simple olives can be turned into a colorful appetizer by melding different kinds and colors of cured olives and doctoring them up with garlic, preserved lemons, oregano, and basil, and serving them in a large, clear bowl. Although the majority of the olives in the shop are grown in Spain and North Africa, many, like the tiny Picholines from Provence, come from the south of France. When I first visited, the olives were simply cured and kept in barrels. Now the many different- flavored varieties are displayed in attractive bowls to tempt the customers. When doctoring up olives you buy, just make sure to include some red peppers, orange kumquats, or bright- green herbs. I love to serve a variety of sizes and kinds in a clear glass or earthenware bowl. Remember to have a tiny bowl nearby for the pits.

In India and Pakistan a very fine pasta, known as seviyan, is used for this quick pudding. Most grocers in the West sell it laid out in long, slim boxes, but in cities like Lahore you can find it in open markets—all exposed, in the shape of little nests of thin pasta piled up into a mountain. The pasta is broken up and lightly browned before it is cooked into a pudding. I find that angel-hair pasta, which often comes in the shape of nests, makes a very good substitute for seviyan, and that is what I have started to use. This pudding may be eaten hot, warm, or at room temperature. In Pakistan, it is known as sheer korma and in India as seviyan ki kheer. On a cold wintry day in North India or Pakistan there is nothing nicer than a warm version of this pudding. The nuts and raisins are optional. You may leave them out altogether and then, if you like, just sprinkle some chopped almonds or pistachios over the top.