Simmer

Thanks to emigrants from North Africa, Passover is once again being celebrated in the town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, which had a flourishing Jewish community until the fourteenth century. Now Jews reunite for the holidays, and at a recent Passover in one house, several couples got together for a traditional meal. Jocelyne Akoun, the hostess of this event, told me about a springtime soup filled with fresh vegetables and fava beans. Because I always have vegetarians at my own Seder, I have taken to making this refreshing and colorful soup as an alternative to my traditional matzo-ball chicken soup. If making the vegetarian version, sauté the onion in the oil in a large soup pot, then add 8 cups water, the bay leaf, cloves, peppercorns, and 1 teaspoon salt, and cook for about an hour. Then put through a sieve and continue as you would with the beef broth. Fresh fava beans are a sign of spring for Moroccan Jews, because the Jews supposedly ate fava beans, poor man’s meat, when they were slaves in Egypt.

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.

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.

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.

In the Charming Town of Cagnes-sur-Mer, whose Jewish population of four hundred comes mostly from Morocco, I tasted a delicious fish soup. This particular recipe is one that painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who lived in the town, would have relished.

On a late-june evening, I entered a courtyard in the Fifth Arrondissement, right near the picturesque Rue Mouffetard, one of my favorite streets in Paris when I was a student there so many years ago. Beyond the courtyard, I found myself in a large garden in front of an apartment building. After climbing two flights of stairs, I arrived at the home of Irving Petlin, an American artist, and his beautiful wife, Sarah. The two expats have lived here on and off since 1959. Sarah frequents the local markets, going to the Place Monge for her onions and garlic, making sure she visits her potato man from North Africa. Having chosen peonies for the table, she arranged them in a vase next to a big bowl of ripe cherries, making her table, with the Panthéon in the background, as beautiful as a perfectly orchestrated still life. At the meal, I especially liked the soup, which calls for lettuce leaves—a good way, I thought, of using up the tougher outer leaves that most of us discard, but which still have a lot of flavor. The French have a long tradition of herb- and- salad soup, something Americans should be increasingly interested in, given all the new wonderful greens we’re growing in our backyards and finding at farmers’ markets. I often replace the zucchini with eggplant and substitute other herbs that are available in my summer garden. This soup is also delicious served warm in the winter.

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.

Yves Alexander, who was born and raised in Paris, now lives in Strasbourg, where his family’s roots go back to 1760. When he is not on the road for his job as a traveling salesman, he does most of the cooking at home. A virtual oral dictionary of gastronomy and French Jewish history, Yves kindly shepherded me around Alsace, where he showed me extraordinary vestiges of a very long past, which went back in some instances to the Roman legions’ trip over the Alps and through Lugano, perhaps during the Battle of Bibracte, in the winter of 59–58 B.C.E. It was here that Caesar’s army defeated the Helvetii, who were trying to migrate from Switzerland to Aquitaine, in the southwest of France. Like every Frenchman, Yves cooks by the seasons. This autumn dish, which he prepares when cèpes (generally known in the United States by their Italian name, porcini) are in season, can be made any time of the year using whatever mushrooms are available. Serve it as an appetizer, or as a main course over pasta with a salad. You can also use dried morels or dried porcini, soaking them first in warm water for about 30 minutes. Yves warns not to throw away the liquid. “Just filter the liquid, and reduce it to enhance the taste,” he told me. When fresh porcini are hard to find, Yves likes using a mix of St. George’s mushrooms (fairy-ring mushrooms) and young pied-de-mouton mushrooms, a native species that he buys at farmers’ markets or gathers in the forests.

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

This rice pudding is known as kheer in North India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and eaten under different names throughout South Asia. It consists, in its basic version, of nothing more than milk, cardamom for flavor and aroma, rice, and sugar. In villages and towns, rice harvests are generally celebrated with a kheer. In some communities, new husbands and wives feed each other a spoonful of kheer during the final part of the wedding ritual. It may be served lukewarm, at room temperature, or cold. Because it is associated with celebration, expensive ingredients are often added, such as saffron, nuts, and dried fruit. Here is the basic version, the one I love the most; you may scatter a tablespoon of chopped pistachios over the top before serving.

This pudding is cooked just like the preceding one but with a few additions.

What is required here is not a cream that one can go out and buy. This “cream” is really a kind of pudding or kheer, thickened by boiling milk down, not by adding starch to it. In order to take some of the labor out of the process, Indians have taken to adding condensed milk. This works very well indeed. This is a thinnish cream, ideal to serve with fruit. I put the cut-up fruit (mangoes, guavas, pears, peaches, and bananas are ideal, but I have used berries as well) in individual bowls, or in old-fashioned ice cream cups, and then pour the flavored cream over the top.

Tapioca pearls and sago pearls are made from two completely different plants, the first from the starchy tapioca/cassava root and the other from the starchy pith removed from the trunk of the sago palm. One originated in the New World, the other in Southeast Asia. Yet the two are endlessly confused. Since their starch is very similar, it hardly matters where cooking is concerned. Indian grocers often put both names, tapioca pearls and sagudana or sabudana (sago pearls), on the same packet. I grew up with this kheer, or pudding. When I came home from school in the middle of a hot afternoon, my mother would have individual terra-cotta bowls of this waiting in the refrigerator. It was very simple and basic, nothing more than milk, sago, cardamom for flavor, and sugar. We called it sagudanay ki kheer, or sago pearl pudding, though it may well have been made with tapioca pearls.

At all of India’s roadside stalls, Masala Chai is served already sweetened. I have added about 1 teaspoon sugar per cup in this recipe, which makes the tea just mildly sweet. You may double that amount, if you prefer.

At Bengali banquets, this chutney, along with deep-fried, puffed white-flour breads (loochis) and pappadoms, is served as the penultimate course, just before the dessert. Here in the Western world, I tend to serve it with the main meal: I layer it thickly on hamburgers, serve dollops with fried chicken and roast lamb, use it as a spread for cheese sandwiches, and, at Indian meals, offer it as a relish with my kebabs and curries.

This South Indian–style dish may also be made with shredded cabbage. Dried rice sticks are sold by East Asian grocers. You will notice that a little raw rice is used here as a seasoning. It provides a nutty texture. Serve with a lamb or beef curry or grilled meats.

Here is one of the great offerings from Kerala, a state on the southwest coast of India, where it is known as uppama. The semolina that is required here is a coarse-grained variety that is sold as sooji or rava in the Indian stores or as 10-minute Cream of Wheat in the supermarkets. (It is not the very fine version used to make pasta.) This pilaf-like dish may be eaten as a snack with tea, for breakfast with milky coffee and an accompanying coconut chutney (see Sri Lankan Cooked Coconut Chutney), or as part of a meal as the exquisite starch.

South Asians do not really eat brown rice, but many people in South India, western coastal India, and Sri Lanka enjoy a very nutritious red rice. The grains have a red hull that is only partially milled. This is eaten plain and also ground into flour to make pancakes and noodles. This recipe works for all the brown rices available in the West, and may be served with all South Asian meals.

Here is a recipe I have devised for the brown rices (and mixtures that combine brown rice with wild rice) usually found in Western markets. Served with vegetables and a yogurt relish, it makes a fine vegetarian meal. You may also serve this with meat and fish curries.

Bulgar, a wheat that has been cooked, cracked, and dried, is used in parts of the Punjab (northwestern India) to make a variety of nutritious pilafs. The coarser-grained bulgar is ideal here. Serve as you would a rice pilaf.