Make Ahead

Once, I asked two-star Michelin chef Thierry Marx of Cordeillan-Bages in Pauillac, the greatest wine-producing area of France, why he uses beets in so many of his dishes—beets for color, beets for sweetness, beets for texture, and beet borscht purée. He replied that he likes to play with the flavors and shapes of his childhood, reminding him of his Jewish grandmother from Poland, who raised him in Paris. “Cooking is a transmission of love,” he told me. One wouldn’t necessarily think of the food Thierry serves in his stunning restaurant as particularly Jewish—it is so molecular, so Japanese (because of where he studied), and so French (because of where he grew up). The dining room of the château, decked out in sleek blackand-white furniture with hints of red, looks out on a vineyard laden with ripe dark grapes ready for picking. But when the bread basket arrived, it contained what looked like a miniature chocolate or poppy-seed babka. My first bite, though, told me that I had still been fooled. This trompe l’oeil was in fact a savory babka, filled with olives, anchovies, and fennel—a delicious French take on a sweet Polish and Jewish classic.

When Huguette Uhry married a local butcher from the town of Ingwiller in Alsace, her sisterin-law lived with her, helping with the cooking. They usually had eighteen people for lunch and dinner, including children, friends, and workers. Today, retired and living in nearby Bollwiller, Madame Uhry is known throughout Alsace as a great cook. Some of her recipes appear on the Web site judaisme.sdv.fr. Here is her brioche, which she starts one day and bakes Rosh Hashanah morning for breakfast, before the family goes to synagogue.

“Look at that beautiful brioche,” I overheard a guest saying at a Bat Mitzvah in Geneva. The brioche was the glistening round challah made by Nicole Garai, the rabbi’s wife. During the service at the hidden Quai du Seujet Synagogue, located near the Rhône River, Nicole helps her husband by escorting assigned readers to the bima (platform). The Garais, French Jews, came to Switzerland to start this synagogue in the 1980s. Nicole told me that she bakes challah for people of whom she is fond, like her congregant, Juliette Laurent, braiding it in a round to signify the circle of life for Rosh Hodesh (the first of the month); she also makes it for the new year, and for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. I especially liked the way she decorated the challah, by first liberally sprinkling a thick band of sesame seeds, then poppy seeds all over the top of the bread. Another trick she uses is to brush the bread twice: once at the beginning of the second rise, after the bread is braided, and again just before she pops it into a cold oven. The procedure of turning on the heat after the bread is in the oven must date back a long time, at least to the beginning of home wood ovens.

Daniel Helmstetter lives his life by the sign that hangs above his bakery in Colmar: “Le talent et la passion.” A fourth-generation baker, he told me that he “fell into the mixer and never came out.” The Helmstetter Bakery was started by his grandfather in 1906 in the central square of Colmar, a town once known for its large Jewish population. Each Thursday and Friday, Daniel still makes barches au pavot, an oval-shaped challah with poppy seeds and a thin braid on top, for his Jewish clientele. Barches (also spelled berches), which means “twisted,” is also a derivation of the Hebrew word birkat (blessing), from the verse in Proverbs 10:22, Birkat Adonai hi ta-ashir, “The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich.” “A local rabbi said that the braid represents the tribes of Israel,” Daniel told me over coffee and pastry at his home near the bakery. “And the poppy seeds, the manna in the desert.” Poppy seeds, once grown in the region, may have disappeared from the fields, but the taste from them lingers on. For his barches, Daniel makes a dough that is tighter than his baguette dough, so that it can be easily braided. In a few nineteenth-century versions, boiled potatoes were substituted for some of the flour in the dough, perhaps to help preserve the loaf over the course of the Sabbath.

In the Middle Ages, pain pétri (kneaded bread) got its name because women kneaded and formed the bread at home and then baked the loaves in public ovens, a tradition that remained in Morocco until recent years. Even in the late Middle Ages, when bread could be easily purchased from a baker, Jewish women still made the pain pétri as one of the three mitzvoth that a woman performs for the Sabbath. (The other two are to light candles, and to go to the ritual bath, or mikveh.) The Sabbath tables of even Reform and Liberal Jews have two loaves of bread. These represent the double portion of manna that was gathered on the eve of the Sabbath during the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. Except on the eve of the Sabbath, manna had to be gathered daily, for it spoiled overnight. Madame Hamier made her recipe using cake yeast, something not readily available in the United States these days, so I have substituted dry yeast here.

Kalonymus Ben Kalonymus, a Provençal Jewish philosopher, writer, and translator who wrote in the early part of the fourteenth century, satirized the Jewish community of Arles for dreaming, while at synagogue, about the honey, milk, and flour that they would use to make their ladder breads for Shavuot. Although fougasse was and is usually made with oil, at this Jewish holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah and the abundance of dairy products at the time of the barley harvest, the Jews used milk. The fougasse was baked in the shape of a so- called ladder, with holes, and candied cherries or candied orange peel hung or embedded in the dough. Ladders to heaven are a common metaphor for holiday breads in Judaism. The fougasse, kneaded and shaped by hand at home for the Sabbath and holidays, was then carried on a board to the baker, sometimes Jewish and sometimes Christian, depending on the size of the Jewish community in the town.

When we were visiting Galimard, one of the perfume factories in Grasse, our guide was an adorable young French girl with huge hazel eyes named Cyrielle Charpentier. After we finished the tour, learning about the flowers from around Grasse that go into perfumes, Cyrielle let us try some of the essences. Noticing a chai, the Jewish symbol for “life,” on a chain around her neck, we asked her if she was Jewish, and she said that she was. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, and her mother, an Italian Jew who also suffered during the war, lived near Grasse. When I asked her what foods she liked, she immediately named her grandmother’s tchoukchouka, a North African dish with tomatoes, peppers, and sometimes eggplant. The purists’ versions of tchoukchouka, this salade cuite, include lots of garlic and no onions, but I have seen some with onions as well. The beauty of this delicious recipe is that it is prepared in advance and tastes even better the next day, especially helpful for the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays, when cooking is prohibited and there is little time to prepare food—you do not have to fuss with a last-minute salad. It can also be used as a base for an egg or sausage dish, and is great as a sauce over pasta.

Beef bouillon was not served only at times of mourning. It was and still often is a base for matzo balls, it is served with noodles, and it is perfectly delicious as a broth, served hot, or cold as consommé gelé (aspic), at the beginning of any meal.

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.

The recipe for these Knepfle, also known as quenelles de matzo or the more prosaic matzo balls, came from Madame Maryse Weil of Besançon, the late mother-in-law of my friend Nanou, French matzo balls, often called boulettes in French and Knödeln in German, are made from stale bread or matzo sheets, soaked in water and dried. These dumplings are neither as big as American matzo balls—they are the size of walnuts rather than golf balls—nor as fluffy, since no baking powder is used. Like many middle-class women in her day, Madame Weil rarely cooked but instead guided those who cooked in her kitchen. Her original recipe read, “Take as many eggs as goose fat. Mix well; add salt, pepper, and ginger and enough matzo meal so you can roll them.” Many of the old recipes, including this one, often substitute marrow for the goose fat. I prefer to cook the matzo balls in boiling salted water and then immediately transfer them with a slotted spoon to homemade chicken broth. This way I can make them in advance, and the soup remains clear.

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.

Sorrel (Eastern European tchav) has been made a little more soigné in the hands of the French, by adding herbs and cream. Whereas Jews often substituted spinach and rhubarb to achieve the tangy flavor when they couldn’t get sorrel, and ate the soup cold, the French, until recently, ate sorrel soup hot. Austin de Croze, in his 1931 cookbook, What to Eat and Drink in France, thought that sorrel soup had come to France with emigrants from eastern Europe. This particular recipe comes from Gastronomie Juive: Cuisine et Patisserie de Russie, d’Alsace, de Roumanie et d’Orient, by Suzanne Roukhomovsky, a book I found years ago while browsing in the Librairie Gourmande, a cookbook store I love to frequent on the Left Bank of Paris. Published by the distinguished house of Flammarion in 1929, it was the first comprehensive cookbook on the Jews of France. Madame Roukhomovsky, also a novelist and poet, called French Jewish cooking cuisine maternelle. This recipe surely has its roots in her own Russian background. If you can’t find sorrel, substitute 1 pound of spinach or kale with 1/2 cup rhubarb to attain that tart flavor, as Jews from Russia did.

Beets and beet soup are as old as the Talmud, in which the dish is mentioned. Borscht, brought to France most recently by Russian immigrants before World War I, is still very popular served either hot or cold, depending on the season. Although there is a meat version, made with veal bones and thickened with eggs and vinegar, I prefer this lighter, dairy beet soup. The French use a bit more vinegar and less sugar than in American recipes, proportions that allow the beet flavor really to shine through. The soup is traditionally topped with dill or chervil, but I use whatever is growing seasonally in my garden, often fresh mint. The combination of the bright-pink beets, the sour cream or yogurt, and the green herbs makes a stunning dish.

Maurice and Anne-Juliette Belicha, together with their two young daughters, lead a Jewish life, bringing their kosher meat from Paris and only using bio (organic) products, in the Dordogne. While Maurice is producing kosher foie gras (see page 47), Anne-Juliette is trying to realize her dream of opening a kosher bed-and-breakfast in the Dordogne. She makes this delicious mango chutney, which marries well with both her husband’s foie gras and with chopped liver.

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.

"There is no such thing as Jewish Alsatian cooking. It is Alsatian cooking,” Chef Gilbert Brenner told me over lunch at his restaurant, Wistub Brenner, with a view over the Lauch River in Colmar, a charming city in southern Alsace that has had a Jewish presence since at least the eleventh century. “Jewish cooks adapted the dietary laws to what was available here,” Monsieur Brenner told me. “France didn’t create dishes. Families created the dishes. It is the cooking of their grandparents and reatgrandparents.” Looking over the menu at Brenner’s popular restaurant, I was taken by this extraordinary leek terrine, which I later learned was put on the menu for Gilbert’s Jewish customers and friends who keep kosher or are vegetarians. During the short asparagus season in the spring, Gilbert substitutes asparagus for the leeks. The recipe is a modern version of very old savory bread puddings, like schaleths (see page 251).

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.

This is made in the same way as in the last recipe, only it has a layer of sliced bananas at the top.

This recipe is very similar to the last, only a bit grander.

This sweet cream, which tastes a bit like crème fraîche, only with a more flowing, creamy texture, is a simple Gujarati dessert, so cooling during Gujarat’s hot summer days. In May and June, when mangoes are in season, thick mango puree is folded in. A teaspoon of saffron threads, roasted and soaked in milk, may be added at the same time as the sugar (see method on page 289) or dried fruit (golden raisins, soaked in boiling water for an hour and squeezed), nuts (chopped pistachios or almonds), fresh fruit (chopped mangoes, bananas, berries), and fruit purees.