Dried Fruit

This old Alsatian dish of rice and fruit sautéed in veal fat is typical of so many simple, seasonal recipes. It is adapted from La Cuisine Juive en Alsace by Freddy Raphaël. The dried fruit, mixed with an onion and sautéed in a little veal fat with prunes and raisins, transforms the rice into a magnificent dish. I have substituted vegetable oil for the suggested veal fat, and I usually serve this rice dish alongside a meat dish.

This couscous dish, originally made especially by Moroccans at the Maimouna, a post-Passover celebration, has become pan–North African in France now that Tunisians and Algerians are preparing it. They also make this dish, using butter and accompanying it with yogurt, at Shavuot, a late-spring holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai and the abundance of milk in the springtime. Sweet couscous can be made with either couscous or rice, although I prefer the texture of the couscous with the raisins and nuts.

When the French make noodle kugel, it is more delicate and savory than the rich, creamy confections that Americans know. This nudel schaleth or pudding is derived from the Sabbath pudding baked in the oven overnight. Here is where linguistic immigration gets all mixed up—some call it noodle schaleth, others noodle kugel.

Bosc pears and Italian blue plums (dried for use in the winter) are fruits that were most often put into kugel. This very old Alsatian Sabbath kugel uses leftover bread that is soaked in water, squeezed to remove any excess moisture, and then mixed with the dried or fresh fruit and left to stew in the oven overnight. Some, like this version, include onions, which add a savory dimension to the sweetness of the fruit and the dough. I love this dish, which I serve in my home for Rosh Hashanah and the Sabbath as a side dish with brisket.

In the heart of Dijon, at the Municipal Museum, right next door to the majestic stone kitchen of the dukes of Burgundy, Alette Lévy checks coats. Once the owner of Dijon’s only kosher butcher shop, she talks food between customers, such as this chicken-tagine recipe she makes for her French friends. The trick to this recipe is to put the almonds in the microwave for 3 minutes, to make them crackly. This way you don’t run the risk of burning them, the way I always seem to do when I forget them in the oven or frying pan. Alette told me you can substitute lamb for the chicken.

Heinrich Heine, the Author of the above poem (which is often sung to the tune of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”), wrote in a letter that he especially liked “the carp in brown raisin sauce which my aunt prepared on Friday evenings to usher in the Sabbath.” Ernest Auricoste de Lazarque, the famous nineteenth-century folklorist, was also impressed by this dish. In his 1890 La Cuisine Messine (Cooking from Metz), he includes a recipe for carpe à la juive from Lorraine. I have seen variants that use nutmeg and saffron as well. Taillevent has a recipe in Le Viandier of 1485 for the sweet-and-sour cameline sauce, so named for its tawny camel color, which includes ginger, cinnamon, cloves, grains of paradise, pepper, mastic, galangal, nutmeg, saffron, sugar, anise, vinegar, wine, and sometimes raisins. Most of the spices were trafficked from far corners of the world by Jewish and other merchants. Mastic, also known as gum arabic, is the resin from the acacia tree and has a sweet, licorice flavor; grains of paradise, sometimes used in making beer today, have an aromatic peppery taste, almost like cardamom and coriander; and galangal, a rhizome related to ginger, has a hot, peppery flavor. The carp with its sweet-and-sour sauce became a Jewish staple, brought out for the Sabbath and holidays, and surviving, as traditional recipes do, in the Jewish community to this day. Although the original recipe calls for a 3-pound carp, washed, cut into steaks, and then arranged back into the original shape of the fish, I often use a single large salmon or grouper or bass fillet instead.

Most Jews in France prior to the twentieth century used handwritten cookbooks passed down from mother to daughter. And since Alsace-Lorraine was under German occupation between 1871 and 1918, the majority of the Jews living there read German, using many of the dozen or so kosher cookbooks published in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Combing through these German books and her mother’s handwritten cookbook, Agar Lippmann, a caterer in Lyon, came across a recipe she had been trying to track down for years. Hutzel wecken, which literally means hat- or dome-shaped little rolls in German, is a very old Hanukkah and To B’Shevat (the new year of trees) fruitcake rarely made today. I prefer it treated more as bread, sliced very thin and served with cheese or really good butter. My guess is that the peanuts were a later addition. If you don’t have all the different dried fruits and nuts, just use what you have. The recipe is very flexible. Once, when I made it for a party, some of the guests liked it so much that, unbeknownst to me, they took home little slices hidden in paper napkins for their breakfast!

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.

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!

Hélène Sancy’s Haroset recipe goes back to her family’s residence in Portugal before the Inquisition. It is probably one of the oldest existing haroset recipes in France today, if not the oldest. Her husband’s job is to grind the fruits and nuts with the brass mortar and pestle, which they inherited, handed down through the generations. Although the Sancys do not roll their haroset into balls as is called for in other old recipes from Spain and Portugal (recipe follows), they have another fascinating Passover custom. First they say a blessing over the bitter herbs (maror)—in their case, romaine lettuce—as a reminder of slavery in Egypt. Then they wrap the romaine around parsley that has been dipped in salt water, a little chopped celery, and about a teaspoon of haroset. The Ashkenazi way, in contrast, is to sandwich bitter herbs and haroset between two pieces of matzo. Curiously, the Sancys’ recipe for haroset, in this land of vineyards in the southwest of France, includes no raisins.

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.

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.

Dumpukht is a style of cooking that was made very popular in India in the Moghul courts starting around the sixteenth century. Meat or rice dishes were semiprepared or, in the case of meats, they were thoroughly marinated, and then put in a pot with a lid that was sealed shut with dough. The pot was placed on lightly smoldering embers. Some embers were also placed on the top of the lid, thus forming a kind of slow-cooking oven. When the dough seal was cracked and the lid removed, the aroma of the spices left the guests oohing and aahing. This cooking style is still very popular in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This is a royal-style dish, rich with almonds and saffron, which are native to Kashmir, and yet it is quite light. The recipe may easily be doubled. For a festive meal, also serve Eggplants in a North-South Sesame/Peanut Sauce, and a rice dish.

This was a family favorite.

This exquisite delicacy makes a ready dessert. Accompany if you like with vanilla ice cream or mascarpone. It is made with fresh dates—the yellow or red varieties, which are hard and sour and totally different from the dried dates with which people in America are familiar. (They are called zaghlouli in Egypt.) It is usual to peel them, but that is an arduous task and, in my view, not all that much worth the effort. They are stuffed with blanched almonds, with which they make a lovely combination.

Use a natural, tart variety of dried apricots, not the sweetened or honeyed ones; they must also be soft. These keep well for weeks and are good to serve with coffee.

In North Africa the almond stuffing is colored green to give the semblance of pistachios, which are considered grander. You can of course use real pistachios.

In North Africa, sfendj, also called khfaf, are sold by street vendors. People buy them for breakfast. They can be plain or with raisins. Eat them hot as soon as they are done or reheat in the oven. Serve them with honey or dusted with sugar.

Algerian polenta fritters are soft and creamy inside and crisp and golden outside. They are eaten hot, but you can prepare them in advance and reheat them. They are delicious.