Hanukkah

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!

No bread form is so complety identified with Jews as the bagel, which came from eastern Europe with immigrants, mostly from/Lód´z, Poland, at the turn of the last century. Unlike American bagels, French bagels were rather like rolls that were baked but not boiled. When Euro Disney and the United States Army in Europe wanted bagels in the late seventies, they asked Joseph Korcarz, whose family ran a bakery in the Marais, to go to the United States to learn the commercial technique of boiling the dough before baking. Two older bread forms, however, might shed new light on the origins of the bagel. In the mountains of Savoie, near the Swiss border, an area with few if any Jews today, there is a specialty of the region—an ancient anise-flavored bread called riouttes, which were boiled before baking, a technique that kept the bread fresher a longer time. Riouttes might have come to the mountains with Jews or with Arabs, who make ka’ak (“bracelet” in Arabic), small, round, crispy rolls with a hole, flavored with anise and sesame seeds. Probably the oldest bagel-like roll in France, however, dating back to antiquity, is the Provençal brassado, also called brassadeau. Sweet and round, with a hole in the center, they are also first boiled and then baked, much like bagels. The word brassado is related to the Spanish and Portuguese words for the physical act of an embrace or a hug. The unusual inclusion of floral scents like orange-flower and rose water could be the influence of Jews involved in the perfume industry in Grasse. This particular recipe is an adaptation of brassados found by Martine Yana in her Trésors de la Table Juive.

Daniel Helmstetter lives his life by the sign that hangs above his bakery in Colmar: “Le talent et la passion.” A fourth-generation baker, he told me that he “fell into the mixer and never came out.” The Helmstetter Bakery was started by his grandfather in 1906 in the central square of Colmar, a town once known for its large Jewish population. Each Thursday and Friday, Daniel still makes barches au pavot, an oval-shaped challah with poppy seeds and a thin braid on top, for his Jewish clientele. Barches (also spelled berches), which means “twisted,” is also a derivation of the Hebrew word birkat (blessing), from the verse in Proverbs 10:22, Birkat Adonai hi ta-ashir, “The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich.” “A local rabbi said that the braid represents the tribes of Israel,” Daniel told me over coffee and pastry at his home near the bakery. “And the poppy seeds, the manna in the desert.” Poppy seeds, once grown in the region, may have disappeared from the fields, but the taste from them lingers on. For his barches, Daniel makes a dough that is tighter than his baguette dough, so that it can be easily braided. In a few nineteenth-century versions, boiled potatoes were substituted for some of the flour in the dough, perhaps to help preserve the loaf over the course of the Sabbath.

In the Middle Ages, pain pétri (kneaded bread) got its name because women kneaded and formed the bread at home and then baked the loaves in public ovens, a tradition that remained in Morocco until recent years. Even in the late Middle Ages, when bread could be easily purchased from a baker, Jewish women still made the pain pétri as one of the three mitzvoth that a woman performs for the Sabbath. (The other two are to light candles, and to go to the ritual bath, or mikveh.) The Sabbath tables of even Reform and Liberal Jews have two loaves of bread. These represent the double portion of manna that was gathered on the eve of the Sabbath during the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. Except on the eve of the Sabbath, manna had to be gathered daily, for it spoiled overnight. Madame Hamier made her recipe using cake yeast, something not readily available in the United States these days, so I have substituted dry yeast here.

At a recent Kiddush after a Bat Mitzvah service in France, the wine was French, unlike the sweet wine usually served at American synagogues. The food was elegantly prepared, as only the French can do it: spread out on a large table were thin slices of smoked salmon on toast, eggplant rolled and filled with goat cheese, a North African sautéed-pepper salad, squash soup served in tiny cups, and celery-root rémoulade. If you have never eaten celery-root salad, then start now! And if you’ve never made mayonnaise before, it’s an exhilarating and rewarding experience that I highly recommend. Any leftover mayonnaise can be kept in a jar in the refrigerator for a few days.

Chef Daniel Rose (see page 68) served the following salad with brandade potato latkes (see page 308) at his Spring Restaurant during Hanukkah. The secret to this colorful winter salad is to keep the fennel very cold. This recipe, and all Daniel Rose’s recipes, may change according to the market and ses humeurs (the chef’s moods).

“I so miss Shabbat meals in France,” a young North African man from Marseille living in Washington told me when we were seated next to each other on a plane. “My mother never makes fewer than ten to fifteen salads.” One of these salads might be a combination of oranges and olives. It is very refreshing, and looks beautiful as one of many Moroccan salads. The black and orange colors remind me of black-eyed Susans. Prepared with argan oil, which comes from argan pits harvested from the argan tree, the salad is balanced with the oranges and grapefruit. These are all 2,000-year-old Moroccan flavors.

Artichokes, one of my favorite vegetable, are edible thistles that were prized by the ancient Romans as food of the nobility. They have been a springtime food in the Mediterranean for thousands of years and particularly loved by Jews. Usually the French serve artichokes as a cold salad appetizer with a vinaigrette. Although I have seen this recipe in many Jewish cookbooks from North Africa, I hadn’t tasted it until Paula Wolfert cooked it for me on my PBS show, Jewish Cooking in America. It was a merveille, as my French friends would say. In the years since, I have eaten many different versions of this salad. Céline Bénitah, who lives in Annecy but came from Berkane, on the Algerian border of Morocco, said that all North African Jews who grew up in this orange- growing region have their own versions of this recipe. Hers includes saffron. Of course, this salad tastes best when fresh artichokes are used, but frozen artichoke hearts or bottoms work as well.

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.

It was in Paris in the 1960s that I first tasted buckwheat blini. My friend Nanou took me to a tiny, chic Russian restaurant near the Champs- Élysées. Russians, many of them Jews, came to France at the end of the nineteenth century, not long before the Russian Revolution, and congregated in restaurants like this one. We ordered the elegantly presented blini, and ate them daintily with smoked salmon and crème fraîche. Twenty years after Nanou died, her son Édouard got married. The wedding party took place at Maxim’s, where we drank lots of champagne and danced until the wee hours of the morning. I was touched to taste blini with smoked salmon and crème fraîche, the same appetizer that Édouard’s mother and I had enjoyed so many years ago. For me, it was as though she were present at the wedding. This recipe was adapted from Lynn Visson’s The Russian Heritage Cookbook.

The French call this appetizer caviar d’aubergine because the feel of the eggplant seeds on your tongue is similar in texture to that of fish eggs. A delicious and easy-to-prepare dish, it has been in the French Jewish repertoire since at least the turn of the last century, when Romanian immigrants introduced the French to their ways of grilling the eggplant with its dark skin intact, a technique learned in the Middle East via the Caucasus. At about the same time, Russian and Romanian immigrants also brought this so-called poor man’s caviar with them to France. Whereas earlier generations used a hand chopper to make this dish, often blending in either lemon juice and olive oil or tomatoes and green peppers, today most cooks pulse it in a food processor. Although it is easier to roast the eggplants in the oven, oven- roasting will not give you the smoky flavor that comes from grilling over an open flame. This is a recipe to play with. Add diced onion, cilantro, or paprika, if you wish, or a few tablespoons of grapefruit juice or even mayonnaise. I have tasted all kinds of eggplant caviar. The last was at a very upscale French Bat Mitzvah, where the eggplant, laced with pesto, spiced with cumin, and decorated with tiny pansies, was served in an eggshell at the Kiddush after the service.

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.

A North African way of cooking carrots.

From the Greek word for “doll,” these Greek meatballs make lovely finger food, as good cold as they are hot.

You can serve these Egyptian fish balls as mezze or finger foods at a party. Use any white fish, such as cod, haddock, bream, whiting, or hake.

Chicken-wing drumsticks are a favorite appetizer and are so quick and easy to prepare and cook in the convection oven. For a bit more fire, add crushed red pepper flakes to the marinade.

Landlocked Umbria does not have a seafood cuisine. But its mountain lakes, rivers, and streams abound in freshwater fish, such as the tasty tench. This simple preparation is one I found in Umbria, and it is excellent for fillets of our sweet-water varieties, such as carp or whitefish, or even light ocean-fish fillets like sole. Serve with a salad, or with the Potato-Mushroom Cake with Braised Lentils (page 200).

Chef Todd Aarons of Tierra Sur at Herzog Wine Cellars in Oxnard, California, shared this recipe as part of a Hanukkah cocktail party menu he created exclusively for Epicurious. These potato and Jerusalem artichoke latkes fry up quickly and are best served immediately, but if necessary, they can be held briefly in a warm oven. If you can't find Jerusalem artichokes—also known as sunchokes—Aarons recommends substituting parsnips or celery root.