Rosh Hashanah

This Veal dish is a big favorite of butcher Jacques Geismar’s Jewish clientele. You can substitute matzo for the bread at Passover, and, if you like, add raisins and apples to the stuffing. This dish is popular for the Sabbath or the high holidays in France, the way brisket or stuffed turkey is in America. Try the stuffing for your next turkey.

It is common knowledge that Jews should usher in the Sabbath with a little bit of fish. But in the village in Poland from which Danielle’s mother hailed, they often could not get carp in the winter, because the lake was frozen. The story goes that the Jews thought they could make an arrangement with God to create falshe fish (Yiddish for “fake fish”). So they made meat patties, shaped in ovals or balls, depending on the family tradition, and simmered them in a broth with salt, sugar, pepper, and a little carrot, so they would look and taste like sweet-and-sour gefilte fish. “Because the intentions were good, the benevolent God agreed with the Jews and said that he would make believe that it was fish,” said Danielle. (In this recipe, sugar is used as a seasoning, as it was in past centuries.)

In France, for Rosh Hashanah and Passover, tongue, with its velvety texture, is often served with a sweet-and-sour ginger sauce. In some homes the tongue is put on the table as a symbol of the wish for success in the New Year. Spicy-sweet sauces often accompanied pickled meats in Alsace, where sugar was first used as a condiment rather than as a dessert sweetener. By the time the meat had been pickled, desalted, and then cooked, it had lost much of its flavor, so sugar, ginger, and other spices ensured a good taste. Jews have a long history of treating tongue, an often scorned cut of meat, as a delicacy. It is preserved and pickled in a salt brine with garlic, pepper, spices, sodium nitrite, and sodium erythorbate. The tongue is then boiled, the skin peeled off, and slices of meat are served with a sauce.

This typical Alsatian mustard sauce is served with pickled or smoked tongue or pickel-fleisch; it has been eaten with fresh and salted meat or fresh and dried fish for centuries by the northern Jewish communities in France.

Alsace is the only part of France with a tradition of France with a tradition of both pork and beef charcuterie. When I asked a butcher in Strasbourg about pickelfleisch (corned beef ) and pickled tongue, he paused to think a minute. Yes, he told me, both are eaten primarily by Jewish clientele. Of that charcuterie, pickelfleisch is the crown prince. Basically corned beef cured for eight to ten days with salt, sugar, spices, and saltpeter and then baked or boiled, it is more garlicky, with more varied spices, than that in America. Try making your own corned beef. It is great fun. Eat it as is or in a choucroute garni (sauerkraut dressed with meat and potatoes).

When I was in Paris, I got in touch with Anita Hausser, Jacqueline’s daughter. We met at a café in Paris to chat. The conversation turned into lunch, then finally extended into a dinner on another occasion in her charming and very French apartment, near the Maison de la Radio in Auteuil. For dinner, the first course was Alsatian goose liver spread on grilled bread, accompanied by champagne. Sometimes, she told me, she slathers the marrow from the cooked bones on the toast instead, sprinkling it with coarse salt. At the dinner we ate as a first course the broth from the pot-au-feu with tiny knepfle (matzo balls), to the delight of her very assimilated French Jewish guests. A century or so ago, in small villages of Alsace, the pot-au-feu cauldron of vegetables and meat would hang on a hook in the chimney to simmer slowly all night. I imagine religious Jews placing it there before the Sabbath began, and going to sleep with the tantalizing aromas of meat and vegetables as the fire slowly turned to embers and died out, leaving the pot still warm. When Anita makes her pot-au-feu, she cooks the meat slowly with the vegetables, which she discards toward the end. She then adds fresh carrots, leeks, and turnips, cut in chunks, for the last 30 minutes of cooking. She always accompanies her pot-au-feu with horseradish, mustard, and gherkins. This slowcooked dish is traditionally made in Jewish homes for Rosh Hashanah and the Sabbath.

Like many other communities in France, the town of Annecy had few Jews living there until the late 1950s. Then, one day, the town’s mayor assembled the Catholic archbishop, the head of the Protestants, and the leader of the tiny Jewish community, who happened to be my relative Rudi Moos (see page 3), and asked them to welcome emigrants from North Africa. Rudi sponsored about forty Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian Jewish families and built a synagogue in this town that had none. Cécile Zana and her husband were one of these families. They left Tunisia and went first to the Congo, and then, in 1968, to Annecy, where they live today. And, perhaps not surprisingly in this small Jewish world, Cécile’s daughter married Rudi’s grandson. Cécile showed me how to make this delicious spring dish with lots of parsley and peas.

This Jewish-style stewed chicken comes from Gastronomie Pratique, a cookbook published in 1907 by Ali-Bab. Born Henri Babinski to Polish Christian immigrants to France, he was by profession a mining engineer, but he loved to cook and travel. Using the pseudonym Ali-Bab, he wrote the book for fun and included a long description of kosher cuisine as well as two Jewish recipes, one for choucroute, and one for poulet à la juive. Basically, he’s making a pot-au-feu, substituting chicken for beef and using fresh rendered chicken fat or veal-kidney suet. Since he finishes the dish off with butter, a no-no in kosher cooking, I have omitted this step. When serving this, I sometimes remove the skin and bones from the chicken for a more refined dish. I pile the chicken over white rice and spoon the gravy on top. Others, who like the meat on the bone, serve it as is. Sometimes called poule au bouillon or poule au pot, it is a comfort dish, and one often served in France for Friday night dinner or for the meal before the fast of Yom Kippur.

While her husband was on a fall Sunday ramble with friends, Anne-Juliette Belicha gave me a cooking lesson in their fifteenth-century house overlooking the fields in the Dordogne countryside. The house is located on the outskirts of Montagnac, right near the caves of Lascaux, renowned for their prehistoric animal paintings. In the kitchen hang photos of the woman who owned the house at the turn of the century, who tended geese for foie gras and to provide goose fat for the winter. Because quinces were in season, Anne-Juliette decided to cook us one of her Algerian husband’s beloved Rosh Hashanah dishes, from a book that is also one of my favorites—150 Recettes et Mille et Un Souvenirs d’une Juive d’Algerie by Léone Jaffin. The quince, believed to be the Biblical “apple” of the Garden of Eden by some scholars, is a complex fruit. Hard to peel and quarter, quinces require careful handling. Once peeled, they darken rather quickly, so you need to keep them in water mixed with a little lemon juice. Anne-Juliette picked the quinces from a friend’s tree and used an old variety of onions—a cross between onions and shallots—that she bought at a nearby farmers’ market. As she cooked, first frying the onions and then the kosher chickens that she buys in Paris, she told us about her dream: to open a kosher bed-and-breakfast in the Dordogne.

The slight tartness of sorrel and the richness of salmon are two flavors that Jews have always loved in their cooking. Eastern European Jews eat cold sorrel soup, which they call tchav; Greek Jews eat a tart rhubarb-and-spinach sauce over fish, and French Jews are drawn to Pierre Troisgros’s now classic salmon with sorrel sauce. Pierre told me that this seminal, simple, and delicious recipe came about because he had grown an abundance of sorrel and had to do something with it. With its subtle interplay of tartness and creaminess, this dish is sometimes made with kosher white wine and vermouth for Jewish weddings held at the restaurant.

According to the Talmud and the French sage Rashi, beets, fish, and cloves of garlic are essential foods to honor the Sabbath. French Jews also use horseradish, sliced as a root or ground into a sauce, and served at Passover to symbolize the bitterness of slavery. It was probably in Alsace or southern Germany that the horseradish root replaced the bitter greens of more southerly climes as the bitter herbs at Passover dinner. For hundreds of years, local farmers would dig up horseradish roots and peel and grate them outdoors, by their kitchens, making sure to protect their eyes from the sting. Then they would mix the root with a little sugar and vinegar and sometimes grated beets, keeping it for their own personal use or selling it at local farmers’ markets. In 1956, Raifalsa, an Alsace-based company, began grating horseradish grown by the area’s farmers in the corner of a farm in Mietesheim, near the Vosges Mountains. A few years ago, Raifalsa, still the only manufacturer of prepared horseradish in France, agreed to produce a batch of kosher horseradish. They had the rabbi of Strasbourg come to the factory to supervise the operation, which resulted in the production of six thousand 7-ounce pots, all stamped with a certification from the Grand Rabbinat de Strasbourg. Before grating the horseradish, just remember to open a window and put on a pair of goggles.

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.

On a recent visit to the Marais, I stopped in at Florence Finkelsztajn’s Traiteur Delicatessen, as I always do. The quarter has two Finkelsztajn delicatessens, one trimmed in yellow (Florence’s ex-husband’s) and one in blue (Florence’s—now renamed Kahn). According to Gilles Pudlowski, the gastronomic critic of Polish Jewish origin who writes the popular Pudlo restaurant guides, Florence’s store is the best place to satisfy a nostalgic craving for eastern European cooking. In addition to Central European Yiddish specialties, like herring, chopped liver, and pastrami, Florence also sells Pudlo, baked in the back of the shop. I have made her recipe, which she gave me a few years ago, and I can assure you it is delicious. Pletzl, short for Bialystoker tsibele pletzl, refers to a circular eastern European flat onion bread, often studded with poppy seeds, that came from the city of Bialystok, Poland. The bread is known in America in a smaller version as the bialy. Try it as a snack hot from the oven, or make a “big pletzl sandwich,” as Florence does. Her fillings vary as much as the different ethnicities of Jews living in Paris today: Alsatian pickelfleisch (corned beef), Romanian pastrami, Russian eggplant caviar (see page 34), North African roasted peppers, and French tomato and lettuce.

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.

“Look at that beautiful brioche,” I overheard a guest saying at a Bat Mitzvah in Geneva. The brioche was the glistening round challah made by Nicole Garai, the rabbi’s wife. During the service at the hidden Quai du Seujet Synagogue, located near the Rhône River, Nicole helps her husband by escorting assigned readers to the bima (platform). The Garais, French Jews, came to Switzerland to start this synagogue in the 1980s. Nicole told me that she bakes challah for people of whom she is fond, like her congregant, Juliette Laurent, braiding it in a round to signify the circle of life for Rosh Hodesh (the first of the month); she also makes it for the new year, and for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. I especially liked the way she decorated the challah, by first liberally sprinkling a thick band of sesame seeds, then poppy seeds all over the top of the bread. Another trick she uses is to brush the bread twice: once at the beginning of the second rise, after the bread is braided, and again just before she pops it into a cold oven. The procedure of turning on the heat after the bread is in the oven must date back a long time, at least to the beginning of home wood ovens.

Walking through the colorful Belleville market in Paris one Friday morning, I came across a Jewish bakery. Glancing in the window, I was surprised to see a triangular Tunisian Friday night bread called bejma, made out of three balls of dough. It was similar in flavor to a good eastern European challah. A few years later, I passed by a branch of Charles Traiteur, on the Boulevard Voltaire, and there was the bejma again, this time placed right next to the eastern European challah.

This is a recipe that Natan Holchaker, an avid cook, makes in Bordeaux. In a take on the classic frisée and lardons, Natan uses duck instead of the prohibited pork. I have found that in France even the most secular French Jews avoid pork, substituting smoked duck instead. You can also substitute turkey bacon or kosher beef fry (akin to pastrami).

When Alexander Zbirou came to France from Tunisia in 1966 to study marketing, there were few good kosher restaurants in Paris. In 1976, he opened a French restaurant, called Au Rendezvous/La Maison du Couscous, in the Eighth Arrondissement near the Champs-Élysées. Four years later, he turned it into a kosher Tunisian restaurant, the only one of its kind in the quarter. Today, there are more than thirty-eight in the Eighth Arrondisement. “I saw Jews arriving in the quarter,” he told me over lunch at his restaurant. “They came, and I was waiting for them. It was home cooking for Tunisians and Ashkenazim. After all, there are lots of mixed marriages here in France.” In 1988, his mother, Jeanne Zbirou, immigrated to Paris, and is now directing the cooking in the kitchen. Well into her eighties, she comes to the restaurant every day to work with her son. His restaurant, although technically kosher, does not close on Friday night or Saturday. “I feel that we are rendering a service to kosher clientele, to give them a kosher meal for the Sabbath,” he said. Other restaurants, under the supervision of the Parisian rabbinical authority, the Beth Din, are either closed for the Sabbath or open only to customers who pay in advance. Sitting down at the restaurant, we were first served an array of kemia, similar to the ubiquitous mezze at Arab restaurants. We began with flaky brik, filled with potatoes, parsley, and hard-boiled eggs (see page 30). At least a dozen salads followed, served on tiny plates, all brimming with bold colors and flavors. Some of my favorites were raw artichoke slivers with harissa, oil, and onions; turnips with bitter orange; and this delicious carrot salad with harissa and caraway seeds. When I asked how much salt they used to cook the carrots, Jeanne said, “Enough salt to make a raw egg rise in water.” In my own kitchen, I prefer roasting the carrots, because it brings out the sweetness of the vegetable.

When I visited my cousins in Annecy, they served me this unusual salad. Its variety of colors and textures is stunning. As with many other cooked salads, it tastes even better the next day, making it a great dish for dinner parties or picnics. The kosher dill pickles came from shopping trips to Geneva and were a big treat.

This classic french potato salad is very simple. A non-Jewish version might include lardons (a type of bacon) and shallots, but instead I use a tart mayonnaise. For a North African touch, you can add sliced hard-boiled eggs and cured black olives. I often add julienned basil with the parsley, or other compatible herbs.