Raisin

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.

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.

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 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.

When the French make noodle kugel, it is more delicate and savory than the rich, creamy confections that Americans know. This nudel schaleth or pudding is derived from the Sabbath pudding baked in the oven overnight. Here is where linguistic immigration gets all mixed up—some call it noodle schaleth, others noodle kugel.

Heinrich Heine, the Author of the above poem (which is often sung to the tune of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”), wrote in a letter that he especially liked “the carp in brown raisin sauce which my aunt prepared on Friday evenings to usher in the Sabbath.” Ernest Auricoste de Lazarque, the famous nineteenth-century folklorist, was also impressed by this dish. In his 1890 La Cuisine Messine (Cooking from Metz), he includes a recipe for carpe à la juive from Lorraine. I have seen variants that use nutmeg and saffron as well. Taillevent has a recipe in Le Viandier of 1485 for the sweet-and-sour cameline sauce, so named for its tawny camel color, which includes ginger, cinnamon, cloves, grains of paradise, pepper, mastic, galangal, nutmeg, saffron, sugar, anise, vinegar, wine, and sometimes raisins. Most of the spices were trafficked from far corners of the world by Jewish and other merchants. Mastic, also known as gum arabic, is the resin from the acacia tree and has a sweet, licorice flavor; grains of paradise, sometimes used in making beer today, have an aromatic peppery taste, almost like cardamom and coriander; and galangal, a rhizome related to ginger, has a hot, peppery flavor. The carp with its sweet-and-sour sauce became a Jewish staple, brought out for the Sabbath and holidays, and surviving, as traditional recipes do, in the Jewish community to this day. Although the original recipe calls for a 3-pound carp, washed, cut into steaks, and then arranged back into the original shape of the fish, I often use a single large salmon or grouper or bass fillet instead.

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.

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.

Dumpukht is a style of cooking that was made very popular in India in the Moghul courts starting around the sixteenth century. Meat or rice dishes were semiprepared or, in the case of meats, they were thoroughly marinated, and then put in a pot with a lid that was sealed shut with dough. The pot was placed on lightly smoldering embers. Some embers were also placed on the top of the lid, thus forming a kind of slow-cooking oven. When the dough seal was cracked and the lid removed, the aroma of the spices left the guests oohing and aahing. This cooking style is still very popular in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This is a royal-style dish, rich with almonds and saffron, which are native to Kashmir, and yet it is quite light. The recipe may easily be doubled. For a festive meal, also serve Eggplants in a North-South Sesame/Peanut Sauce, and a rice dish.

In North Africa, sfendj, also called khfaf, are sold by street vendors. People buy them for breakfast. They can be plain or with raisins. Eat them hot as soon as they are done or reheat in the oven. Serve them with honey or dusted with sugar.

The name means “Ali’s mother,” and it is the most popular sweet in Egypt. I had never heard of it when I lived there, but now it is everywhere. People in Cairo say it arrived in the city from the villages of Upper Egypt, but there it is said to be from Cairo. One joker explained that it was a bread pudding introduced by a Miss O’Malley, an Irish mistress of the Khedive Ismail. Go and believe him! People find all sorts of ways of making it—with pancakes, with thinly rolled-out puff pastry, with pieces of bread, and with fillo pastry. Fillo gives the most appealing texture, and it is good to bake the pastry initially rather than fry it in butter as is usual in Egypt.

This intriguing rice pudding made with water—not milk—called zerde in Turkey and sholezard in Iran, has a delicate flavor and pretty, jellylike appearance.

A mixed dried fruit salad with nuts is a favorite in Egypt during Ramadan, the month-long fast, when Muslims fast during the day and eat after sunset. All through the day, people, hungry and listless, are hardly able to work, and dream of what they would like to eat. At nightfall, when the sky is a cherry red, the cannons boom through the cities signaling the end of the fast, and the muezzins sing it out from all the minarets. The silent city suddenly comes alive with the clatter of spoons and plates, glasses and jugs, and with the sound of relieved hunger and laughter, of music and merry-making. The longed-for dishes wait on tables, trays, and the floor, piled high with ful medames, falafel, and bamia, meatballs and kebabs, khoshaf and apricot cream (following recipe). Every family has its favorite combinations of dried fruits.

This grand bulgur pilaf spread throughout the countries that were part of the Ottoman Empire. It is used as a side dish and a stuffing.

The success of this Turkish pilaf depends on the flavor of the orange-fleshed pumpkin, which varies. (It should be sweet-tasting.) I prefer the dish without the raisins.