Baking

I like to use frozen berries for this crumble. Not only can I have it any time of year, but the juices left in the bag after thawing provide sweetness (without adding a lot of sugar) and sauce for the crumble.

Do you have trouble making up your mind? How does this sound: grilled meat, salad, take-out Thai food, and pizza, all in one meal? There are no special ingredients required; you can get them all in the regular market and have this pizza on the table in less time than it would take the delivery man to get to your door.

Get in “The Zone.” These calzones are meat-free, super hearty, and super healthy. Eat up, chow down, and enjoy.

This is a pizza I discovered on a trip to Rome as I wandered the side streets with my mom. It became such a favorite of mine that, on a return trip I made in the cold late fall, I think I ate hot, half-kilo blocks of it every day for a week. This is my at-home version. I love the feeling of giant slices of this hanging from my mouth. It really brings me back to Roman Holidays.

Buttermilk biscuits are a classic recipe that combines steam leavening and chemical leaveners to optimum effect. They are easily stirred together and rise dramatically in the oven. Slathered with cold butter and drizzled with cane syrup or honey, fresh biscuits are an easy and indulgent way to get your day started. Actually, they are pretty wonderful at any time of day. Buttermilk biscuits on the dinner table bring smiles to people’s faces, and split open and covered with fresh fruit and sweet cream, they are a treat to remember.

We love the dark, rich flavors of the classic dessert bananas Foster. One time when we had an overabundance of bananas we decided that creating a bread featuring these flavors would be ideal. We used muscovado sugar, an intensely flavored sweetener, to help mimic the caramelized notes of the original dish. We combined baking powder and baking soda to maximize our leavening and ensure a light, tender bread. It’s darned good all on its own, but we’ve also used it for French toast and bread pudding with fabulous results. Leftover bread can be toasted or grilled and slathered with butter for an excellent breakfast or snack.

We like to make whole wheat sandwich bread at home. We use a pain de mie bread pan, a French loaf pan that comes with a lid so the finished bread has perfectly square slices (although whether or not we use the lid depends on our mood). Sometimes perfect squares are desirable; sometimes we prefer a slightly bigger piece of bread. This dough will work either way. As for flour, we are partial to the King Arthur white whole wheat for its flavor, but you can use the whole wheat flour of your choice. This is a wet dough that will bake up into a moist, cakey loaf, excellent for toast and sandwiches.

These are the perfect dinner rolls. Light and tangy, they are delicious eaten out of hand, dragged through a bowl of sauce, or slathered with good butter. Leftover rolls can be kept in a plastic bag and reheated in the oven or they can be split and toasted for breakfast. They can be sliced for bread pudding or diced for stuffing. If you prefer, you can shape the dough into two long loaves instead of small rolls, or you can shape it into the traditional wide, flat slipper loaf that ciabatta is named for. Either way, it makes for excellent sandwiches or grilled crostini.

Good brioche is an amazing thing. The bread is light, buttery, and full of flavor. It can be somewhat labor intensive in its original form, so we were immediately intrigued by the idea of creating a no-knead version. Normally the butter is beaten into the dough, but here we melt it and add it to the wet ingredients. The long resting period allows it to be fully absorbed into the dough without all that extra work. This may seem like a large recipe, but the dough can be used to make various sweet breads like the sticky bun recipe that follows, and the plain loaves freeze beautifully.

These sticky buns can be prepped in the skillet the day before, stored in the refrigerator, and baked in the morning for a decadent weekend breakfast indulgence—although they are so good that sometimes we just make them for lunch and ride the sugar high into the afternoon. Soft raisins make a big difference. If yours are dry you may want to soak them in water at least overnight. Instead of rolling out individual buns, we score the top of the bread for easy cutting and bake it as a whole. That way you can control the portion size and the bread itself cooks more evenly—no more doughy centers. We love that.

Before I get into this recipe I want to be very clear about something. While this is my fail-safe bread dough recipe, I don’t guarantee that it will be a fail-safe recipe for everyone, although your probability for success is very high. I can make this bread in my sleep and fashion it into almost every flavor under the sun with a tweak here or a twist there. Substitutions for ingredients are provided in parentheses. Try it once the way it is written to get the hang of things and then have fun with the possibilities. Any leftover rice or cooked grains can be added to the dry ingredients before mixing the dough. They will provide flavor and moisture to the finished product. A raw chopped onion mellows beautifully in the finished loaf. Chunks of cured meats, cheeses, olives, or herbs can be added when forming the loaves. Just flatten the dough into long rectangles. Sprinkle your chunks onto the middle three-quarters of the dough, leaving a space at the top and bottom. Roll up the dough, lengthwise. Make sure the seam is on the bottom of your sheet tray. Let proof and continue as the recipe indicates. Use your imagination here because the dough is very forgiving and will accept most additions with grace.

Visiting eighty-five-year-old Aimée Beressi and ninety-one-year-old Lydia Farahat is like crawling into a cozy casbah. Friends since they left Egypt in the late 1950s, they get together once a week at Lydia’s apartment on Rue Dragon, right near Saint-Germain-des-Prés. For more than forty years, the two have been discussing recipes, current events, and the Egypt of their childhood. When Aimée was growing up in Cairo, there was no school on Thursday, so she helped her mother and aunt make the cakes and cookies for the Sabbath. The word rosquettes, which comes from the Spanish rosquillas, refers to round cookies with a hole. Aimée still bakes a batch each week to bring to her friend of so many years.

This melt-in-your-mouth cookie, also called ghouribi, comes from Oran, Algeria, but is widely used across North Africa. I love its soft, crumbly texture, made from crushed nuts and sugar. It reminds me of Mexican wedding tea cakes or Greek kourambiedes. You can substitute butter for the oil if you like. These irresistible and simply made drop cookies are eaten on Purim, Hanukkah, and Shabbat, when Moroccan Jews decorate the table with flowers and sweets. They are also one of the symbolic cookies that women gather together today in France to make for weddings and other life-cycle events.

As a child, I love the holiday of Purim, the time when my mother would make hamantashen, filled with apricot jam or dried prune fillings. As a young adult, when I was living in Jerusalem, I discovered a whole new world of hamantashen fillings, and the magic of the shalach manot, the gift baskets stuffed with fruits and cookies. Traditionally, these were made to use up the year’s flour before the beginning of Passover as well as to make gift offerings. Strangely enough, hamantashen are little known in France, except among Jews coming from eastern European backgrounds. The North African Jews don’t make them, nor do the Alsatian Jews, who fry doughnuts for Purim (see following recipe). French children who do eat hamantashen like a filling of Nutella, the hazelnut-chocolate spread. You can go that route, or opt for the more traditional apricot preserves, prune jam, or the filling of poppy seeds, fruit, and nuts that I’ve included here.

To learn how to make the French macaroons that I tasted at many bakeries and homes in Paris, I asked Sherry Yard, executive pastry chef at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, for guidance. Spending a day with Sherry and her staff, I had the opportunity to witness how American pastry chefs are learning from the macaroon-crazy French. The first of these dainty macaroon sandwiches filled with chocolate ganache was developed by the pastry chef Pierre Desfontaines Ladurée at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today almost every pastry shop in France makes them in a dizzying array of flavors and colors with jam, chocolate, and buttercream fillings. Some pastry shops make certified kosher versions. Here is a master recipe for the chocolate macaroon, with suggestions for making them vanilla- or raspberry-flavored. I have given a recipe for chocolate-mocha filling as well. You can also fill them with good-quality raspberry jam or almond paste. After you have made a few macaroons, use your own imagination to create others. And do serve them for Passover.

Sheila Malovany-Chevallier is a typical Parisian expat, one who lives a fascinating life. She and her husband, Bill, reside in a bohemian artist’s apartment in the Latin Quarter during the week, and in the countryside, near Dijon, on weekends. Spending her work time teaching English at the Institute d’Etudes Politiques, and doing a new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, she would seem unlikely to have time to cook. But not only have she and her writing partner, Constance Borde, also an American living in Paris, written several American cookbooks in French, with all the Jewish recipes with which Sheila grew up, but when she is invited to dinner, she makes a point of bringing every hostess an elegantly packaged sweet she has made herself. These ginger cookie clusters are one of her and my favorites.

In Jewish homes in France and all around the world, recipes for macaroons have been handed down from mother to daughter for centuries. Jewish macaroons are descended from the Ladino marunchinos and almendredas, both terms for almond cookies. In fact, during the Inquisition, historian David Gitlitz told me, crypto-Jews were accused of having bought almond cookies from the Jewish quarter in Barbastro, in Aragón. The modern Jewish macaroon is specifically associated with Boulay, a town about twenty-five miles north of Nancy. It seems that a Jewish wine salesman named Bines Lazard opened in 1854 Maison Lazard, along with his wife, Françoise, and their son Léopold, where they sold macaroons, matzo, and wholesale wine. In 1898, the folklorist Auricoste de Lazarque tasted their macaroons, and proclaimed them the best in France, making the company enormously successful. During World War I, the Lazard family sold the wine business, and in 1932, they abandoned the matzo trade. Some thirty years later, the business, which included its secret recipe for macaroons, was sold to Jean Alexandre, who opened a shop in Boulay where macarons de Boulay are baked and sold to this day. Made from the traditional mixture of almonds, sugar, and egg whites, they are slightly robust, a departure from the flat and shiny French macaroons that are so popular today. Although the Alexandres would not give me their secret recipe, Yves Alexandre (no relation), from Strasbourg, had me taste his, which are very similar but made by hand, rather than machine.

When researching this book, I talked about Jewish food with Pierre Dreyfus, a greatgrandson of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer on the French General Staff who was falsely accused of being a German spy. The one recipe that Pierre remembered from his childhood was for butter, or butterkuchen, simple shortbread butter cookies sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. A century ago, butterkuchen, similar to sablés in Brittany, were made by using equal weights of eggs in their shells, butter, sugar, and flour. Sometimes cooks would add a little kirsch or vanilla sugar. Some used a glass to cut round pieces from the cookie dough; others pressed the dough into pans and cut it into tiny squares or rectangles after baking. One elderly lady I interviewed told me how her grandmother would make butter in the summer from the fresh, unpasteurized cream of their cows and store it in a stone jar on a ledge outside their house all winter long. Then, when she wanted to use the butter for butter, it was right there. One day when I was visiting Sandrine Weil (see page 181), she and her daughters showed me how to make a tender butter. This is her take on the butterkuchen, made with rich French butter, which has a low water and high fat content, and is cut after baking into the traditional 1-inch squares.

This cookie was one that “Mamine”—an affectionate name for Maryse Weil, the matriarch of the Weil family from Besançon—baked as a young girl for family gatherings. Her granddaughter Martine Trèves makes it now in her kitchen. She showed me the recipe from a handwritten book that suggested adding a “grain of salt” to the batter.