African

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).

Eveline Weyl remembers growing up in France with a green-wheat soup, served every Friday evening. “We called it gruen kern or soupe au blé vert, and it was made, basically, by simmering onions and carrots and using green wheat to thicken the broth,” she told me. “My mother said it was very healthy for us children.” I asked all over for a recipe for this dish but couldn’t find one. Then, watching a Tunisian videographer from Paris taking photographs of his mother making soup, I realized that the soup Tunisians call shorbat freekeh, made with parched wheat, is nearly the same as the green-wheat soup for which I had been searching. Young green wheat is available at select health-food stores these days, and made into juice. Ferik or freekeh is the parched substitute. I like this soup so much that I often use barley, bulgur, wheat berries, or lentils if I can’t find the green wheat. In fourteenth-century Arles, Jews ate many different kinds of grains and legumes. Chickpeas, which came from the Middle East, and green wheat were probably two of them. The original recipe for this soup called for lamb bones, but I prefer a vegetarian version. The tomato paste is, of course, a late addition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This haroset recipe originated in Toledo, Spain, before the Inquisition, and found its way to Tétouan, near Tangier, in northern Morocco, and then to Paris, where it is served today. Dates, the predominant fruit in most Moroccan haroset, are mixed with apples before being rolled into little balls. Sylviane Lévy (see page 65), whose mother gave her the recipe, says to roll them in cinnamon, then serve them in little paper cups. These balls look like chocolate truffles and taste like Passover petits fours!

A sign of the popularity of North African food in France is this hot sauce, which is now prepared and sold in open-air markets and grocery stores throughout the country. In Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, the recipes vary slightly from village to village. I have seen it used today in salads, in bourride, in rouille, and in soups.

Once, while visiting Le Monde des Épices (see page 26), I asked the owner which Jewish cookbook in his large selection he especially liked. His favorite one at the time was 150 Recettes et Mille et Un Souvenirs d’une Juive d’Algérie (150 Recipes and 1,001 Memories of an Algerian Jewish Woman) by Léone Jaffin, one of the steady stream of North African Jewish cookbooks since the 1970s. This book includes such unusual recipes as these Swiss-chard bestels, traditionally eaten on Rosh Hashanah. North African Jews frequently use the bright-green leaves of beets or Swiss chard, called blette. A prayer is recited over the vegetable, called salek in Hebrew, meaning to remove or throw out, with the hope that in the coming year enemies will be removed from the community’s midst. I have added curry powder, pine nuts, and currants to this tasty turnover, which I sometimes serve with salad as a first course.

Brik are crisp, flaky appetizers found in Tunisian, Algerian, and Moroccan kitchens in France. The word refers to the dough, similar to the Moroccan warka, which one makes by tossing fistfuls of a wet, pastelike batter onto a hot grill. The batter miraculously spreads into a thin, pliable sheet, which may be used as an appetizer or dessert wrapper. You can find unbaked feuilles de brik (brik leaves) in Middle Eastern food stores or online (see A Source Guide, page 370). If you can’t, use wonton wrappers instead, or even phyllo dough, although your finished product will not have the same grainy texture as real brik. I often make these filled pastries as an appetizer at Hanukkah, instead of potato pancakes.

Cairo vendors sell these bread rings covered with sesame seeds from large baskets, or sometimes threaded onto long wooden poles. They often sell them with zaatar (page 47) or do’a (page 55) to dip in. In summer, they cry their wares at the entrances of open-air cinemas, or carry them round the tables and across the rows of chairs, chanting “Semit! Semit!” The audience eagerly collect provisions to last them through the performance: rings of semit, cheese, salted grilled melon seeds or leb, peanuts, and Coca-Colas. They while away the time as they wait for darkness to fall and the film to start by eating and chatting; or they watch the children running up and down the aisles, and dancing on the cinema stage to popular Arab and Greek tunes. (We danced when we were children.)

In Turkey it is sade pilav; in Egypt it is roz mefalfel. The ingredients and quantities are the same as in the first recipe. Turks always use butter and plenty of it for rice to be eaten hot, and use olive oil when it is to be eaten cold. Butter is truly wonderful with rice, but some people today have turned to using a bland vegetable or seed oil, sunflower oil being the most common.

Walking along the corniche or waterfront in Alexandria, one is irresistibly lured by the smell of corn grilled over charcoal. Vendors sit behind little braziers filled with glowing coals, fanning the flames furiously, or letting the sea breeze do it for them.

In Morocco tea—a refreshing infusion of both green tea and mint—is the symbol of hospitality, prepared with art, served with ceremony, and drunk at all times of the day. Introduced in the nineteenth century by the English, tea became an indispensable drink. It is traditionally served in richly engraved English-style silver teapots (the grandest are from Manchester) on silver trays with tiny legs. It is poured from a great height into small, ornamented colored glasses. Spearmint is the type of mint used, and the infusion is sweetened in the teapot. In Morocco they like it very sweet, with many lumps of sugar, but you can suit your taste.

A famous North African specialty with an exciting bittersweet flavor.

This famous and formidable chili paste goes into many North African, especially Tunisian, dishes. It keeps very well for many weeks in the refrigerator if covered with oil. You can now find it store-bought more easily, including some homemade-type artisanal varieties.

Preserved lemons lend a unique and distinctive flavor to North African dishes. You find the softened lemons in jars, or sold loose in street markets. They are now also common fare in the south of France. You can make them yourself. They take about 4 weeks to mature and can last a year. When they are ready to use, the pulp is scooped out and thrown away—only the skin is eaten. You can use small limes with thin skins, or ordinary lemons with thick ones. There are three common ways of making them.