Potato

One summer we worked as private chefs on a ranch in Montana. One of our jobs was to oversee the chefs in the employee kitchen. We watched as they lamented the crew’s love of ranch dressing, culminating one evening when a guy poured it on his lasagna. We were fascinated by how much people loved the flavor of ranch and slowly began to weave it into our repertoire just for fun. These gnocchi were one of our first experiments and are still one of the best.

We like to make whole wheat sandwich bread at home. We use a pain de mie bread pan, a French loaf pan that comes with a lid so the finished bread has perfectly square slices (although whether or not we use the lid depends on our mood). Sometimes perfect squares are desirable; sometimes we prefer a slightly bigger piece of bread. This dough will work either way. As for flour, we are partial to the King Arthur white whole wheat for its flavor, but you can use the whole wheat flour of your choice. This is a wet dough that will bake up into a moist, cakey loaf, excellent for toast and sandwiches.

A Römertopf, a porous clay pot developed in the 1960s by a German company, is often used in Alsace and southern Germany for long- simmering stews. These stews may be akin to Alsatian baeckeoffe, a pot of meat (usually beef, pork, and veal along with calf or pig feet) mixed with potatoes, marinated in white wine, and cooked in the oven all day long, on Mondays, when the women traditionally do the wash. Agar Lippmann (see page 258) remembers her mother in Alsace making the Sabbath stew in a baeckeoffe, using a mix of flour and water to make a kind of glue to really seal the lid. When I was having lunch at Robert and Evelyne Moos’s house in Annecy, they used a Römertopf to make a similar lamb stew for me. Eveline ceremoniously brought the dish to the table, and in front of all of us, took off the top so that we were enveloped in the steam and aromas of the finished dish.

This is one of those simple French vegetable combinations that just taste really good, especially for Friday night dinner, next to a well-roasted chicken. Although it has become popular to cook green beans for a short time, I still prefer them when they are meltingly tender!

With my first bite of potatoes sarladaises, I fell in love with the dish. Originating in the town of Sarlat, it is served everywhere in the Dordogne. Cooks sometimes include lardons (a kind of bacon) or giblets, and sometimes, depending on the season, truffles or porcini mushrooms. I was delighted when Anne-Juliette Belicha (see page 47) offered to give me a potatoes-sarladaises lesson at her home in Montignac. I guarantee that this dish will be a crowd pleaser.

The earliest known French potato dish is pommes de terre dauphinoises, which originated in Switzerland in 1600. I tasted this divine dish of scalloped potato, cheese, and milk, a specialty of the region near Annecy, at the home of Ruth Moos (see page 3), who made it as an evening dairy meal served with a salad and vegetables. Instead of covering the potatoes and the cheese with the traditional beef bouillon or broth, Ruth makes it kosher style using only cream or milk.

Old cookbooks of Jewish families from Provence and descendants of the Juifs du Pape contain a famous dish combining spinach and morue (salt cod; see page 290). Morue is also blended with mashed potatoes to make brandade, a typical dish of the south of France. The preserved fish is rehydrated in milk or water, and then grilled, fried, or baked. Fritters were particularly common, and are still prevalent throughout Spain and Portugal. This recipe, a modern interpretation of a traditional salt-cod-and-potato brandade, was created by Chef Daniel Rose (see page 68). He uses fresh cod, salting it briefly to remove the excess moisture, seasons it with thyme and garlic, and then cooks it in milk and olive oil. Mixed with mashed potatoes and fried, the result yields a sort of latke that can be served as an appetizer, a side dish, or a main course, with the fennel-and-citrus salad on page 110.

Although potato pancakes (or latkes) go by many names in France—palets de pommes de terre, pommes dauphines, the Alsatian grumbeerkischle, and matafans, a mashed-potato latke typical of Savoie—a latke by any other name is still a latke. In Poland, these egg-free latkes are made with older potatoes, whose increased starch helps bind them together. You can just dress the traditional latke with a dollop of applesauce, or you can try a variation made with apples and sugar.

This recipe, made from mashed potatoes fried in little patties, came from Poland to Metz a century ago. I have tasted different versions of Passover and Hanukkah chremslach, whose name refers to the well in the pan in which they were traditionally formed before frying. Sometimes stuffed with meat, they should be eaten piping hot, as directly from the pan as your fingers and tongue can stand.

“I was lucky during the war,” Albert Jacobs, a tiny man whose personality belied his stature, told me at his home in Ingwiller. “When war broke out, I was eighteen years old and was mobilized into the French army. I left Ingwiller with my knapsack on my back, marching in the middle of the road. My beret and wooden shoes gave me the air of youth.” Instead of taking the train he was supposed to take, he and his comrades had a picnic and took the following one. As luck would have it, the Germans bombed the first train. Later, when it got dangerous for the Jews in the army, Monsieur Jacobs had to go into hiding. “Here too I was lucky,” he told me. “An old grandmother who owned eight farms let me stay with her. She never told anybody that I was there.” Until he was almost ninety, Monsieur Jacobs dressed up three days a week, drove his car slowly into town, and ate lunch at the Cheval Blanc, where he also often dined with the local priest. “Everybody knows that I don’t eat pork,” he told me shortly before his death. When I asked him why he didn’t move to a larger city, like Strasbourg, his response was quick: “Here I am someone, and there I would be just an old Jew.” At Monsieur Jacobs’s home, a virtual museum of Alsatian Jewish history, the jewels were the old cookbooks in the attic and basement libraries. The books contained some handwritten recipes and were those of his late wife. “Books were her life,” he said. She collected all the old recipes from her mother, who lived with them until she died at ninety-five. When I looked through her handwritten book, I saw recipes like grimserle, which I know as krimsel or chremslach, a Passover fritter with nuts and raisins (which I wrote about in Jewish Cooking in America), schaleth (see page 251), cou d’oie farci (stuffed goose neck), gemarti supp (see page 76), and this grumbeerekugel, a potato kugel with onions, eggs, and soaked bread—all humble dishes of country Jews who used the food that was available. In the old days, they cooked with goose, chicken, or veal fat. In the recipe that follows, I have substituted vegetable oil or butter for those not serving a meat meal, and I often mix the potatoes with celeriac and sometimes cooked peas or green beans. By microwaving the grated potatoes for a minute, I cut down the cooking time from 2 1/2 hours to 45 minutes. This kugel is crisp and very delicious.

One-Dish Sabbath meals like choucroute and pot-au-feu are for Alsatians what cholent is for Jews from eastern Europe. In the nineteenth century, the author Alexandre Weill mentioned the Sabbath lunch meal of his childhood, which included a dish of pearl barley or beans, choucroute, and kugel, made with mostly dried pear or plum. Choucroute with sausage and corned beef is also eaten at Purim and has particular significance. The way the sausage “hangs” in Alsatian butcher shops is a reminder of how the evil Haman, who wanted to kill all the Jews, was hanged. Sometimes Alsatians call the fat hunk of corned or smoked beef “the Haman.” Michèle Weil, a doctor in Strasbourg, makes sauerkraut on Friday, lets it cool, and just reheats it for Saturday lunch. She varies her meal by adding pickelfleisch, duck confit, chicken or veal sausages, and sometimes smoked goose breast. You can make this dish as I have suggested, or vary the amounts and kinds of meats. Choucroute is a great winter party dish; the French will often eat it while watching rugby games on television. When you include the corned beef, you can most certainly feed a whole crowd.

One Friday morning when I arrived at Philippe and Caroline’s home, the family was in full Shabbat swing. Four of Caroline’s nine children were nearby to help with preparations for the Sabbath. Caroline was assembling ingredients for cholent, based on a recipe that came with her family from Poland. Caroline makes cholent each week, cooking it all night in a slow cooker and serving it at lunch on Saturday. She simmers the meat in red wine, adds some barley and sometimes bulgur, and uses vegetable oil instead of the traditional chicken shmaltz.

One morning, as my editor, Judith Jones, and I were wandering around the streets of Strasbourg looking for a cell-phone store, I bumped into three young men having a smoke outside a restaurant. I saw “Crocodile” written on their chefs’ jackets and asked if Emil Jung, the chef-owner and a friend of a friend, was in the restaurant. They said he was and told me just to go knock on the door to say hello. We did; three hours later, we left the restaurant having been wined and dined beautifully by him and his lovely wife, Monique. One of their Alsatian specialties is fish choucroute (sauerkraut) with heavenly beurre-blanc sauce, a dish appreciated by customers who follow the laws of kashrut. In Strasbourg, where everybody eats sauerkraut, there is even a Choucrouterie theater and restaurant built on an old sauerkraut factory. Roger Siffert, the affable director of this bilingual (Alsatian dialect and French) cabaret theater, says that they serve seven varieties of choucroute, including fish for observant Jews. “With words like pickelfleisch and shmatteh existing in both Yiddish and Alsatian,” said Siffert, “people should reach out to what is similar, not separate. In Alsace we call Jews ‘our Jews.’ ”

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.

This is a very quick recipe, even quicker today because of Picard Surgelés, the French chain of grocery stores selling superb frozen food products. Although the vegetables are not certified kosher, even the Beth Din of Paris, the religious governance, approves of their use. I tasted this particular soup at a Shabbat dinner at the home of North African–born Sylviane and Gérard Lévy. Gérard, who is a well-known Chinese-antique dealer on Paris’s Left Bank, recited the prayer over the sweet raisin wine sipped on the Sabbath in French homes. Everyone then went into the next room for the ritual hand-washing. When they returned, Gérard said the blessing over the two challahs before enjoying the meat meal, which began with this creamy (but creamless) frozen-pea-and-tarragon soup.

This is a Delhi/Uttar Pradesh–style dish. I like to use very small, waxy potatoes, each cut in half. If they are larger, you will just have to dice them. The potatoes hold together best if you boil them whole and let them cool at room temperature before you peel and cut them. We generally serve this curry with Indian flatbreads or with the puffed-up pooris. Pickles and chutneys are served alongside. This combination is very popular in North India for breakfast. Sips of hot milky tea ease the spicy potatoes down nicely.

We eat these potatoes with our eggs on Sundays, with our Indian meals, and also with our more Western roasts and grills. They are versatile and good.

A southern potato curry from the Chennai region. In Chennai, this would be served with rice, and in the north, with a flatbread. Dal and vegetables should be added to the meal.

Chaat in India refers to certain kinds of hot-and-sour foods that are generally eaten as snacks but may be served at lunch as well. When I was growing up in Delhi, the servants cooked the main dishes but it was my mother who always made the chaat, not in the kitchen but in the pantry where she kept her chaat seasonings, the most important of which was roasted and ground cumin seeds. Chaat could be made out of many things—various boiled tubers, boiled legumes like chickpeas and mung beans, and even fruit such as bananas, green mangoes, peaches, guavas, and oranges. Chopped cilantro may be sprinkled over the top just before serving. Serve at room temperature with cold chicken, with kebabs, and, for Indians at least, with tea. Indians love hot tea with spicy snacks.