Make Ahead

These pickled limes use Vadouvan spice blend, sometimes labeled French curry, a combination of Indian spices often including curry leaves, fenugreek, mustard seeds, coriander, shallots, and garlic. The exact blend depends on who makes it. It is aromatic and gives a haunting depth of flavor to the finished pickles. They are wonderful with fish, pork, and roasted vegetables and add a subtle tang to sauces, rice pilafs, or creamy grits. Lime pickles can be finely chopped into a condiment, used whole in braises, or thinly sliced and gently fried. Once you taste them, a world of possibilities opens up before you.

When we think of kimchi we tend to picture the classic kind found in Asian supermarkets, which is made primarily with Napa cabbage stained red from the chili powder and pungent with garlic. Interestingly, although that is indisputably the most popular variation, kimchi can be made with a wide array of vegetables and spices, with regional variations that affect the ingredients used and levels of heat and spice. Here we’ve used red cabbage for two reasons. The first is because we like its sweet flavor and slightly sturdy texture. The second, more practical, reason is that these fermented pickles are generally deemed ready when enough lactic acid is produced to change the pH from 6.5 to approximately 3.5. Red cabbage juice changes color at this pH and becomes a bright reddish-purple, giving you a visual cue when fermentation is complete. Kimchi is a surprisingly good condiment for grilled hot dogs. It is a great way to doctor up packaged ramen at home. In place of coleslaw on a sandwich, it can add an unexpected kick to anything from corned beef on rye to pulled pork on soft white bread. Its heat and tang are wonderful for cutting through rich ingredients, and as a substitute for sauerkraut in choucroute, it is utterly delicious.

Maple vinegar is a favorite of ours for its rich, nuanced flavor. Our version is not a product that can be found commercially, so there is a real reward in trying this recipe at home. Once you have it in your pantry, you’ll easily find many different uses for it. It’s wonderful drizzled over roasted squash or balanced with a touch of cayenne and butter and brushed over corn on the cob or a roasted chicken. It’s amazing simply spooned over a rich, runny piece of brie, accompanied by crisp apple slices, or blended with diced apples and jalapeños as a condiment for meat or game. It also makes for a surprisingly balanced maple martini when combined with ice-cold gin or vodka. The possibilities are endless.

Pickled watermelon rind is a classic summer condiment when the melons are in abundance. Here we’ve added our twist by using Japanese yuzu juice and rice wine vinegar to give the pickles a kick.

We use organic cider vinegar as a starter because it usually contains a live mother. If you have friends who have made their own vinegar, you can begin with their live vinegar instead. In either case, we start with equal parts, by weight, of live vinegar (vinegar with mother) and wine. Make sure there is enough room in the jar to add more wine as the vinegar develops. Wrap the mouth of the vinegar jar with cheesecloth to prevent vinegar flies from taking a dip and then place the lid back on top. A little patience here will yield great results.

This brine is wonderful with a pork shoulder or racks of lamb. We would brine the shoulder for forty-eight hours and the lamb racks for twenty-four. Whole chickens would also be great after twenty-four hours in the brine and a few hours on a rack to dry. You could even follow the Roast Chicken (page 218) procedure to finish them and have a meal to remember. For root vegetables like parsnips or celeriac, we peel them, cut them into bite-size pieces, brine them for a couple of hours, pat dry, and then roast or sauté them. The honey helps amplify their natural sweetness while the mustard provides a great contrasting kick of acid and spice. They are wonderful alongside salmon or any other full-flavored fish.

This recipe is a play on the ubiquitous smoked salmon with cream cheese and a bagel. It was one of our favorite lazy Sunday breakfasts when we were living in New York. Once we moved away from the city, we found that we didn’t always have access to great bagels or smoked salmon. We needed to find a good alternative that was readily available. “Everything” bagels—which typically contain onion, garlic, and several seeds—are our favorite, characterized by their crunchy coating of various seasonings. So we decided to use that flavor profile for cured salmon fillets and cream cheese that we could easily make at home.

Clearly, toasted milk powder was not part of the original Everything Spice Blend. We add it here to give it depth of flavor. That milk proteins also help it stick to the fish is an incidental benefit. The real bonus is the toasty flavor it imparts, which adds to the perception of the toasted bagel flavor in the finished fish or whatever else you may season with it.

Vanilla salt can add that mysterious sweet note that gives depth to many dishes without any actual sweetness. Its floral, fragrant aroma teases you into expecting sweetness and its deep flavor adds nuance to the background notes of a dish. We enjoy pairing it with fish, root vegetables, and other inherently sweet ingredients because this aromatic salt helps enhance their natural sweetness. Sometimes the flavor of vanilla can be overpowering and adding it this way can be just the right touch. We also use it for sweet preparations—for example, as a finishing salt for caramels, or lightly sprinkled on a chocolate tart.

What would a French or any festive meal be without a little chocolate? Françoise Tenenbaum, a deputy mayor of Dijon, shared her entire recipe book with me. When she has time in her busy schedule, she rolls these chocolate truffles at home to serve for parties. They are also perfect for Passover.

We love the balance of salt, sugar, and pepper with the intense savory flavor of meat. Although we dubbed this Beef Seasoning, we use it on anything and everything, from hot smoked salmon to grilled eggplant, when we feel it’s appropriate. It’s a wonderfully balanced seasoning that brings out the inherent savoriness in food. We’re not afraid to substitute different peppers either. Togarishi, a Japanese pepper blend, hot smoked paprika, green chile powder, and harissa powder can add subtle nuances to the finished blend. What’s important when choosing your pepper is making sure it’s one you feel passionate about.

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.

When I was a student in Paris, I became hooked on intensely tart yet sweet French lemon tarts, and sampled them at every pastry shop I could find. I still love them, especially when they are bitingly tart.

“I’m not much of a cook,” Michèle Weil told me as she ushered me into her charming kitchen in a residential section of Strasbourg. Fresh basil was growing on her kitchen windowsill, and paintings from the Jewish School of Paris adorned the walls. “But,” she continued, “I have to cook. All French women cook.” A full-time pediatrician and the mother of three boys, Michèle is smart enough to know she can’t do it all. On medical call before we arrived for dinner, she quickly pulled from the freezer a package of hunks of frozen salmon and cod, bought at Picard Surgelés. Then she boiled some potatoes, put the fish in the oven, and opened a carton of prepared Hollandaise sauce, which she microwaved and poured over the baked fish. Putting this together with a green salad with tomatoes and her homemade vinaigrette, she had made a quick and balanced dinner. Like all working women, Michèle has to make compromises. “My mother would never have given you frozen food,” she apologized. “But, no matter how busy I am, I would never buy desserts. I always make them,” she told me as she presented a free-form rhubarb tart that she had made before going to work. It seemed that every Jewish cook I visited in Alsace served me rhubarb, the sour-tasting sign of spring. Unlike Americans, who almost always marry tart rhubarb with strawberries and lace the two with large quantities of sugar, French cooks make a less sweet tart using only rhubarb. They peel the stalks first, which I do not. I think it might be one of those French fetishes, like always serving radishes with butter, or tomato juice with celery salt. Alsatian home cooks also serve their tart with a delicious custard topping made from cream and eggs.

In the early twentieth century, a Jewish woman named Geneviève Halévy Bizet, the mother of Marcel Proust’s friend Jacques, held one of the most popular women’s salons in Paris, depicted in Proust’s work. Gertrude Stein, the Jewish writer, along with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, hosted another famous salon, conversing with and cooking for writers and artists during the many years when they lived together in France. One of the recipes Alice liked to serve to their guests was very similar to this prune-and-fig compote. In Alsace and southern Germany, prune compote is eaten at Passover with crispy sweet chremslach, doughnutlike fritters made from matzo meal (there is a recipe for them in my book Jewish Cooking in America).

This quick passover-flan recipe came recently to Paris with North African Jews and has stayed. A quick dessert usually made with canned pineapple, it is even better with fresh. Because it can be prepared two days in advance, and left in the mold until serving, the flan is popular for Sabbath-observant Jews.

When I interviewed Gilles Choukroun, one of the darlings of a new generation of French chefs who are injecting playfulness into French food, he had just opened the Mini Palais, a beautiful restaurant in Paris’s newly renovated Grand Palais exhibition hall, across from Les Invalides. In addition to his nascent restaurant empire, Gilles is also the father of Generation C, which stands for “Cuisines et Culture,” a group of chefs who teach cooking to the disadvantaged in Paris. Gilles, whose father is a Jew from Algeria, experiments with the spices and flavors of North Africa to accent his French food. One of his signature desserts is this refreshing citrus-fruit soup. It makes the perfect ending to a North African meal, especially with cookies on the side.

Baba is the yeast pastry that became familiar in Lorraine in the early nineteenth century and is eaten, as described above, by the Jews of Alsace for Purim breakfast; it was sometimes confused with Kugelhopf. The French gilded the lily, dousing the dry baba with rum—a novelty from America. Today babas are baked and served two ways, in either a large or a tiny bulbous mold. I adore baba soaked in rum and order it whenever I can. After tasting an especially light baba in a tiny sixteen-seat restaurant called Les Arômes in Aubagne, I asked the chef, Yanick Besset, if he would give me his recipe, and here it is. As you can see, a good baba dough itself contains very little sugar, the sweetness coming from the sugar-rum bath spooned on after baking.

When I was trying to figure out how to make nougatine, I consulted pastry chef Ann Amernick, who has perfected nougatine and makes it effortlessly. This recipe is adapted from her latest book, The Art of the Dessert.

The original Soufflé Rothschild, created for James Rothschild by Antonin Carême, was a baked soufflé embellished with gold leaf. Since then, there have been all kinds of “Rothschild” soufflés, salads, and other dishes— the name is used to denote extravagance or richness. This frozen soufflé Rothschild was conceived by the famous pastry chef Gaston Le Nôtre, for a grand dinner at the home of one of the Rothschilds. It was served to me at a dinner party in Paris, and is one of the most delicious desserts I have ever tasted. Neither an ice cream nor a sorbet, it is technically a bavaroise glacée, a frozen parfait based on eggs and cream. The best part of this recipe is that it is quite quick to make. Just watch— your guests will sneak back for seconds and thirds!