Hanukkah

Homemade raisin challah bread is a real treat. Slice this light, egg-rich loaf thick for toast or use it to make a memorable French toast. This bread can be frozen for up to two weeks.

Babka is a rich, yeasted cross between bread and coffee cake with an equally rich Russian and Polish culinary heritage. The name is derived from the Russian baba, which means grandmother, an appropriate name for this wonderful comfort food. While it is mostly known as a popular Jewish bread filled with some combination of chocolate, cinnamon, almonds, even poppy seeds and sometimes topped with streusel, it can also be filled with raisins or soaked with rum, as in baba au rhum. The dough is rich enough that it can also be used for brioche and kugelhopf. In American bakeries, babka is most often formed as a twisted loaf with veins of the sweet filling running throughout, baked either in a loaf pan or freestanding. However, the Israeli version, known as kranz cake, uses a dramatic shaping technique that many of my recipe testers found appealing. This recipe is my favorite version, with both cinnamon and chocolate in the filling. Of course, you can leave out the chocolate and make a cinnamon sugar version, or leave out the cinnamon and make just a chocolate version, but I say, why leave out either? It’s easier to grind the chocolate chips or chunks if they’re frozen. After you grind them, you can add the cinnamon and butter and continue to process them all together. The streusel topping is also optional, but I highly recommend using it on the freestanding versions.

The national dish of the Philippines, chicken adobo is popular in Filipino immigrant communities all over the world, including the Hawaiian Islands. This recipe comes from my auntie’s friend, Violet Sadural, who was born in the Philippines and now lives in Honolulu. Beef, fish, vegetables, chicken, and pork can all be cooked adobo style. Although open to the discretion of each cook, the basic adobo ingredients are usually vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, peppercorns, and sometimes ginger. The dish is served simply, with white rice and stir-fried vegetables.

I’ve been unable to master Arabic, so I have no idea if there’s a translation for the phrase “snack cake.” My mother, who was half Syrian (and never mastered Arabic either), often made this cake for me when I was a kid. As an adult, I frequently find myself craving a piece for a snack. Or whatever a between-meal nibble is called. When I got the recipe from her, I read it through and noticed there wasn’t any butter in the cake. I figured it was probably a mistake, but when I baked it up, I found that no butter was necessary—the cake simply didn’t need it. It does benefit from a very generous dusting of powdered sugar, which can be a little messy, but part of the fun of Middle Eastern desserts is licking your sugary fingers after you’ve polished off the last bite.

This melt-in-your-mouth cookie, also called ghouribi, comes from Oran, Algeria, but is widely used across North Africa. I love its soft, crumbly texture, made from crushed nuts and sugar. It reminds me of Mexican wedding tea cakes or Greek kourambiedes. You can substitute butter for the oil if you like. These irresistible and simply made drop cookies are eaten on Purim, Hanukkah, and Shabbat, when Moroccan Jews decorate the table with flowers and sweets. They are also one of the symbolic cookies that women gather together today in France to make for weddings and other life-cycle events.

Sheila Malovany-Chevallier is a typical Parisian expat, one who lives a fascinating life. She and her husband, Bill, reside in a bohemian artist’s apartment in the Latin Quarter during the week, and in the countryside, near Dijon, on weekends. Spending her work time teaching English at the Institute d’Etudes Politiques, and doing a new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, she would seem unlikely to have time to cook. But not only have she and her writing partner, Constance Borde, also an American living in Paris, written several American cookbooks in French, with all the Jewish recipes with which Sheila grew up, but when she is invited to dinner, she makes a point of bringing every hostess an elegantly packaged sweet she has made herself. These ginger cookie clusters are one of her and my favorites.

When researching this book, I talked about Jewish food with Pierre Dreyfus, a greatgrandson of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer on the French General Staff who was falsely accused of being a German spy. The one recipe that Pierre remembered from his childhood was for butter, or butterkuchen, simple shortbread butter cookies sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. A century ago, butterkuchen, similar to sablés in Brittany, were made by using equal weights of eggs in their shells, butter, sugar, and flour. Sometimes cooks would add a little kirsch or vanilla sugar. Some used a glass to cut round pieces from the cookie dough; others pressed the dough into pans and cut it into tiny squares or rectangles after baking. One elderly lady I interviewed told me how her grandmother would make butter in the summer from the fresh, unpasteurized cream of their cows and store it in a stone jar on a ledge outside their house all winter long. Then, when she wanted to use the butter for butter, it was right there. One day when I was visiting Sandrine Weil (see page 181), she and her daughters showed me how to make a tender butter. This is her take on the butterkuchen, made with rich French butter, which has a low water and high fat content, and is cut after baking into the traditional 1-inch squares.

When I was a student in Paris, I became hooked on intensely tart yet sweet French lemon tarts, and sampled them at every pastry shop I could find. I still love them, especially when they are bitingly tart.

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.

This is one of my favorite winter Alsatian vegetable combinations, and a common winter vegetable dish of French Jews. It is best made a day in advance and left to meld the flavors. Serve as an accompaniment to roast goose, chicken, or duck.

I used to think that this dish, called carciofi alla giudea, originated in Rome. But now I am not so sure. When I was visiting Barcelona last spring, it seemed as if every restaurant, every bar, every street vendor was selling this crispy delicacy of deep-fried artichoke flavored with herbs and garlic and served cold. I love it. This is a recipe that has come down in the family of Violette Corcos Abulafia Tapiero Budestchu of Paris.

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 risotto recipe from Natan Holchaker, a retired dentist and food hobbyist in Bordeaux, includes smoked goose breast. If you cannot find a kosher version, substitute smoked turkey breast.

People often ask me what kind of latkes were eaten before potatoes came to the Old World from the New. This onion pancake gives us a taste of that past. Buckwheat, called farine aux Sarrazins or blé noir in French, is used for this recipe. Although rendered goose fat was traditionally the oil used in Alsace and elsewhere in Europe, oils made from safflower, walnuts, and other nuts and seeds were also used, probably pressed by the farmers who brought them to markets where they were sold. The recipe, although attributed as Alsatian in one cookbook, is clearly from eastern Europe, as the word “gretchenes” means buckwheat in Polish.

To the Horror of chef Daniel Rose (see page 68) of Spring Restaurant in Paris, it is impossible to find an American brisket in France. It just doesn’t exist. American butchers tend to cut larger pieces of meat. Five- or six-pound briskets (poitrines) or huge rib-eye steaks (entrecôtes) are the result of sawing through the muscle or the shoulder section of the animal. French butchers, by contrast, cut around the contours of the muscles to yield more tender but much smaller pieces. French Jews tend to use a breast of veal that usually has a pocket inside it for stuffing for their brisket. In this version, Daniel applies French techniques to make a perfectly delicious brisket with a subtle hint of orange in the sauce. I always make this dish a day in advance.

Jocelyne Akoun (see page 28) also served me meatballs with tomato sauce for Friday night dinner, a typical Sephardic dish for the eve of the Sabbath. I had found centuries-old recipes for these almondeguilles or albondigas, but without tomato sauce. For me, the post–Columbian Exchange marriage of tomatoes and meatballs greatly enhances the flavor of this dish!

Rashi teachers us a great deal about cooking in the eleventh century. In the Talmud a rabbi “told his attendant: roast a goose for me, and be careful of burning it.” Rashi explains that “they would roast geese in their small ovens which opened on top. The food would be suspended from the opening, which would then be sealed until the food was roasted.” One hundred fifty years ago, goose was the meat par excellence in the Jewish communities of Alsace- Lorraine and southern Germany. In my grandmother’s notes in German on roast goose, she includes a recipe for “hurt goose,” meaning goose roasted without its outer skin and the fat underneath, which of course was used to render the fat and to make gribenes, crispy rinds, my grandfather’s favorite treat. They also carefully separated the skin from the long neck, stuffed it with meat, onions, flour, and spices, and cooked it as a Sabbath delicacy. Ariane Daguin, head of D’Artagnan Foods, had me try this crispy recipe from her mother, a French- Polish Jew. To make the goose less fatty, Ariane cooks it very slowly, leaves it overnight in the kitchen so that the fat can jell, then roasts it in a hot oven to crisp the skin, the absolutely most delicious part of the goose.

When I was in Bordeaux, I received a call from Yaël Nahon, a young woman in public relations who loves to cook. We decided to meet at the Place des Quinconces, a beautiful square near the harbor with shimmering water where children play in the summer. In her spare time she is trying to re-create the dishes of her mother and grandmother, who came from Oran, in Algeria. Like many other North Africans, she uses spigol (an Algerian spice combination of hot pepper, saffron, and cumin, now packaged in Marseille) to enhance the flavor of her chicken dishes. This is a dish Yael ate every Friday night of her childhood. It was always preceded by several salads and followed by cookies and fruit.

This is one of the down-to-earth recipes Baroness Rothschild loves. When I made the dish for a friend, he said that, like stuffed cabbage, this Bohemian chicken recipe tasted better on the second day. Holding it only enhances the flavor, making it a perfect dish for Shabbat.

Chicken flavored with fennel and garlic is a very Jewish Friday night dish, one eaten by Rashi and his family in the eleventh century. I have found recipes for it in many historical cookbooks, but the inspiration for this version was a particularly tasty one from the late Richard Olney, who lived in Provence. There is something very comforting about the long-simmered fennel and garlic topped by the sautéed chicken.