Meal Prep

When we were visiting Galimard, one of the perfume factories in Grasse, our guide was an adorable young French girl with huge hazel eyes named Cyrielle Charpentier. After we finished the tour, learning about the flowers from around Grasse that go into perfumes, Cyrielle let us try some of the essences. Noticing a chai, the Jewish symbol for “life,” on a chain around her neck, we asked her if she was Jewish, and she said that she was. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, and her mother, an Italian Jew who also suffered during the war, lived near Grasse. When I asked her what foods she liked, she immediately named her grandmother’s tchoukchouka, a North African dish with tomatoes, peppers, and sometimes eggplant. The purists’ versions of tchoukchouka, this salade cuite, include lots of garlic and no onions, but I have seen some with onions as well. The beauty of this delicious recipe is that it is prepared in advance and tastes even better the next day, especially helpful for the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays, when cooking is prohibited and there is little time to prepare food—you do not have to fuss with a last-minute salad. It can also be used as a base for an egg or sausage dish, and is great as a sauce over pasta.

I have always thought that the best part of fish soup is the rouille, a peppery, garlicky sauce that is slathered on toasted rounds of baguette and floated on the surface of the soup. I also like to stir some rouille into the broth. Similar to the Provençal aioli, a garlic-flavored mayonnaise, rouille is flavored with hot pepper and saffron, which give it its signature rust color. (Rouille literally means “rust” in French.) Today I have noticed that North African Jews often spice up their rouille even more, by adding a little harissa (see page 33) to it. Traditionally, a mortar and pestle are used to pound the garlic, pepper, and egg yolk, gradually incorporating the oil to make a mayonnaise. Today it is easy to put everything in a food processor and slowly add the oil, drop by drop. Leftover sauce is good on sandwiches or as a dip.

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.

"There is no such thing as Jewish Alsatian cooking. It is Alsatian cooking,” Chef Gilbert Brenner told me over lunch at his restaurant, Wistub Brenner, with a view over the Lauch River in Colmar, a charming city in southern Alsace that has had a Jewish presence since at least the eleventh century. “Jewish cooks adapted the dietary laws to what was available here,” Monsieur Brenner told me. “France didn’t create dishes. Families created the dishes. It is the cooking of their grandparents and reatgrandparents.” Looking over the menu at Brenner’s popular restaurant, I was taken by this extraordinary leek terrine, which I later learned was put on the menu for Gilbert’s Jewish customers and friends who keep kosher or are vegetarians. During the short asparagus season in the spring, Gilbert substitutes asparagus for the leeks. The recipe is a modern version of very old savory bread puddings, like schaleths (see page 251).

A sign of the popularity of North African food in France is this hot sauce, which is now prepared and sold in open-air markets and grocery stores throughout the country. In Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, the recipes vary slightly from village to village. I have seen it used today in salads, in bourride, in rouille, and in soups.

A mixture of aromatic (and generally expensive) spices that according to the ancient Ayurvedic system of medicine are meant to heat the body. This is the only spice mixture that I ask you to make at home and keep in storage. Its aroma is unsurpassed if mixed and ground at home in small quantities. Also, it will not contain cheap “filler” spices, such as coriander seeds, as many commercial mixtures do. I do keep the store-bought mixture in my cupboard as well for use in certain dishes that require less perfume. My recipes will tell you which one to use.

What is required here is not a cream that one can go out and buy. This “cream” is really a kind of pudding or kheer, thickened by boiling milk down, not by adding starch to it. In order to take some of the labor out of the process, Indians have taken to adding condensed milk. This works very well indeed. This is a thinnish cream, ideal to serve with fruit. I put the cut-up fruit (mangoes, guavas, pears, peaches, and bananas are ideal, but I have used berries as well) in individual bowls, or in old-fashioned ice cream cups, and then pour the flavored cream over the top.

Nose-tingling and refreshing, this Sri Lankan relish goes well with all curry meals. You could also serve it at Western meals with roast pork or pork chops.

Here is a condiment that I just cannot live without. You can add a dollop to curries or use it as you might any prepared mustard. It perks up hot dogs, my husband smears it on bacon and ham, it goes with roast beef, and it is a lovely, pungent addition to sandwiches. We always keep a jar in the refrigerator. Try smearing it on fresh pineapple slices to serve with a curry meal or a ham or pork roast (see next recipe), or use it to make Vegetable Pickle (see page 258).

Yogurt relishes are eaten with meals throughout India. They are nearly always savory, though in western states like Gujarat a little sugar is added as well as the salt to give a sweet-sour-salty flavor.

This delightful chutney is served with all manner of savory steamed rice cakes and pancakes. I love it with the Semolina Pilaf on page 222, but it may be served with most Indian meals. Store in the refrigerator 2–3 days or freeze leftovers.

This may be served with all Indian meals. It is particularly good with grilled meats and kebabs and makes an exciting dip for vegetables and all manner of crisps and fritters. Also, try a layer of it in a sandwich (cheese, turkey, or tomato-and-lettuce) instead of butter.

A fresh chutney to serve with all Indian meals, it has a shelf life of 2–3 days if stored in the refrigerator. What is not used up may be easily frozen for another day.

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.

This hot, savory chutney is from what used to be India’s northwest frontier but now is on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. There it is made with fresh red chilies, which have beautiful color and medium heat. They are not always easy to find, so I use a mixture of red bell peppers and cayenne pepper. They are always combined with nuts, generally almonds but sometimes walnuts. This chutney may be frozen. It is like gold in the bank. Serve it with kebabs, fritters, and with a general meal.

Eating a karhi is really a way of eating heated yogurt. Because yogurt would curdle into unappetizing blobs if it were to be just heated up, it is stabilized with a flour first. In India, where there are many vegetarians who know that a bean, a grain, and a milk product can make for a balanced meal, it is chickpea flour that is used. Known variously as garbanzo flour, gram flour, chickpea flour, farine de pois chiches, and besan, it is very nutritious as well as full of a nutty flavor. Karhis are cooked over much of India with many interesting regional variations. This yogurt sauce, spicily seasoned and quite scrumptious, is either poured over rice or put into individual bowls and eaten with whole-grain flatbreads. Meats and vegetables are often served on the side.

You need the patties from the preceding recipe and the same pan used for browning them with its leftover oil. This is in fact a continuation of the last recipe and makes for a quick curry, good with rice, bread, and also with fried eggs and toast! So, make the preceding recipe, remove the patties from the frying pan with a slotted spatula, put them on a plate, and proceed immediately to make the curry sauce. For a simple meal, serve with a rice dish and Corn with Aromatic Seasonings.

An Anglo-Indian acquaintance in Calcutta once told me that when he went to buy his sausages from the family butcher, he always took along the spices he wanted as flavoring. He would hand these to the butcher and then watch as his choice of meat was ground, seasoned, and pushed into casings. I made a note of the seasonings and now make those sausages all the time. I do not always bother with the casings. I make sausage patties, using all the same spices. We eat these with eggs on Sundays, ensconced between slices of bread as sandwiches, or I put them into a curry (see next recipe), just as Anglo-Indian families have been doing over the years.

This recipe may be easily doubled. I just love it with Tomato Pullao.

Candied tangerine or orange peel is the sweet element in this festive Persian rice with carrots. Persian shops sell the candied peel, as well as slivered almonds and pistachios. To make the candied peel yourself, see the recipe that follows this one.