Raisin

It is a good idea to roll up and fry one of these fish balls before forming the whole batch. You can check the seasoning and add a little salt and pepper if you like before you cook them all. Cooking a little sample is a good thing to keep in mind when you’re making meatballs, too.

Sometimes I peel eggplants completely, sometimes not at all. Leaving the peel on adds a slightly bitter taste—which I like—but also helps the eggplant hold its shape after you cut it into cubes or slices. If you want the best of both worlds, remove thick stripes of peel from the eggplant, leaving half the peel intact. Caponata can last several days in the refrigerator and is even better after marinating for a day. It is best eaten at room temperature, so remove it from the refrigerator about 2 hours before serving. Caponata is usually served as part of an antipasto assortment, although it makes a wonderful summer contorno, or side dish, to grilled meats or fish.

Traditional rice pudding contains cream, eggs, and sugar. You’ll find none of that here. You will find healthful whole-grain brown rice, raisins, creamy Greek yogurt, and lovely flavor from real vanilla bean and cinnamon. Eat any leftovers for breakfast.

About ten years ago, my friend Donna told me she had made chicken with leeks—just leeks—for dinner the night before and she raved about it! I made my own version of Leek-y Chicken that night and I’ve been making it ever since. I included a version of this recipe in my first 30-Minute cookbook back in 1998, but I could not do a book on “Express” cooking without including Leek-y Chicken in some form. Here it is served on a bed of couscous.

Serve with a green salad.

Pedro Almodovar is my favorite foreign film director—I have his whole library. My favorite film and the one I most relate to: Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Serve with a green salad and crusty bread.

These sticky buns can be prepped in the skillet the day before, stored in the refrigerator, and baked in the morning for a decadent weekend breakfast indulgence—although they are so good that sometimes we just make them for lunch and ride the sugar high into the afternoon. Soft raisins make a big difference. If yours are dry you may want to soak them in water at least overnight. Instead of rolling out individual buns, we score the top of the bread for easy cutting and bake it as a whole. That way you can control the portion size and the bread itself cooks more evenly—no more doughy centers. We love that.

As a child, I love the holiday of Purim, the time when my mother would make hamantashen, filled with apricot jam or dried prune fillings. As a young adult, when I was living in Jerusalem, I discovered a whole new world of hamantashen fillings, and the magic of the shalach manot, the gift baskets stuffed with fruits and cookies. Traditionally, these were made to use up the year’s flour before the beginning of Passover as well as to make gift offerings. Strangely enough, hamantashen are little known in France, except among Jews coming from eastern European backgrounds. The North African Jews don’t make them, nor do the Alsatian Jews, who fry doughnuts for Purim (see following recipe). French children who do eat hamantashen like a filling of Nutella, the hazelnut-chocolate spread. You can go that route, or opt for the more traditional apricot preserves, prune jam, or the filling of poppy seeds, fruit, and nuts that I’ve included here.

Kugelhopf, seen in every bakery in Alsace, is the regional special-occasion cake par excellence. The marvelous nineteenth-century illustration by Alphonse Lévy shows how this tea cake, which he calls baba, was also revered by the Jews of Alsace. Kugel means “ball” in German, and hopf means “cake” in Alsatian. This cake is found all over Germany, Austria, Hungary, and parts of Poland. According to food historians Philip and Mary Hyman, a Kugelhopf is first mentioned in German texts in the 1730s, where it is described as a cake baked in a mold shaped like a turban. I suspect that this cake went back and forth throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire with travelers and cooks, and possibly came back to Lorraine as baba, also a turbaned cake in its original form. Sometimes kugelhopf is raised with yeast; some later versions use baking powder. It may contain raisins, or a combination of raisins and almonds. Kugelhopf molds are as varied as the myriad recipes. You can easily find kugelhopf molds at fine kitchen-supply stores, or you can use a small-capacity Bundt pan. Be careful to watch the cake as it cooks, since baking time will vary depending on the size and material of your pan, and you do not want to let the cake dry out.

No large sign—just a plaque next to a simple security button—tells you that this is the gate to a simple building housing the Cercle Bernard Lazare. The center was named in memory of Bernard Lazare, who, during the Dreyfus Affair, was a left-wing literary critic, anarchist, Zionist, and newspaper editor. He bravely defended Captain Dreyfus, and won over Jewish artists such as Camille Pissarro to the cause. The center sponsors Jewish cultural events, choosing not to advertise its location because of previous anti-Semitic attacks. When I entered this very bare-boned building, it was full of activity. Jeanine Franier came out of the kitchen to greet me, bringing along a waft of the delicious aromas from her oven. Every Thursday, before the center’s weekly lectures, she cooks. She believes that people listen to lecturers more attentively if they know a little food will be served. Regardless of what her staff cooks as a main course, this cheesecake from her Polish past is served for dessert. It has become an integral part of the lectures, and was published in the Cercle’s cookbook, called Quand Nos Boubés Font la Cuisine (When Grandmothers Cook), which she wrote in part as a fund-raising device, in part as a way of preserving a culture that is rapidly being forgotten. The cheesecake reminds me of many I ate all over France, including the one at Finkelsztajn’s Delicatessen in Paris. It tastes clearly of its delicate component parts, unlike the creamy block of cheesecake with a graham-cracker crust we find in the United States.

The word Cassolita comes from the Spanish word cassola or cazuela, which refers both to a round clay pot and that which is cooked in it. A Sephardic squash dish from Tétouan, Morocco, this cassolita is scented with cinnamon and caramelized onions and gets a nice crunch from the almonds. It is typically served with lamb couscous (see page 236), although it goes well with any hearty meat dish. When I made it for a dinner party for my editor, Judith Jones, all the high-powered foodies attending asked me for the recipe. It can be made ahead and then reheated before serving.

When I was visiting the Luberon, we wound our way up to the top of the hillop village of Bonnieux and stopped at the Musée de la Boulangerie. There, in an ancient house, the history of bread and baking is traced. Among the ancient pots and pans were shallow unglazed earthenware bowls called at the museum “tians,” which were and are used much like Dutch ovens for cooking vegetables in the embers of a fire. In the south of France, there are many recipes for tians, layered casseroles of vegetables sometimes mixed with eggs and sometimes with rice and served in the Jewish way as a main course for a dairy meal. In this recipe, a nice substitute for the spinach would be Swiss chard, also a vegetable used since antiquity.

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.