Spinach

Stoup is what I call a meal that serves up thicker than a soup yet thinner than a stew. This hearty hunter’s chicken stoup is a family favorite of ours, especially on chilly nights.

Serve with a green salad.

I tasted this simple bleeding of two green vegetables at Irene Weil’s home in Nice (see page 170). Always a big hit, it is colorful, delicious, and a perfect vegetable dish, particularly for Passover. “You can make this dish with fresh peas, green asparagus tips, fava beans—the list is endless,” said Irene.

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.

Gerard Monteux, who is a descendant of the Juifs du Pape, told me that this was a very famous dish from Carpentras, eaten at Purim. (It is also a Lenten dish.) In this town, which had an oven in the Jewish quarter, cooks prepared the dish at home, putting it in an earthenware tian. They then brought it to the public oven and baked it, fetching it when it was done. Our modern-day casserole dishes have evolved from this tradition.

This delightful jewish recipe adapted from one by the famous Provençal food writer Jean-Noël Escudier in his La Véritable Cuisine Provençale et Niçoise uses matzo meal to coat the trout, which is stuffed with spinach and sorrel, or, if you like, Swiss chard. Trout was and still is found in ponds on private property in Provence and throughout France. This particular recipe is served at Passover by the Jews of Provence.

When Dr. Sylviane Lévy (see page 65), a physician in Paris, got married, she had a Passover dilemma. Her husband’s Tunisian family ate m’soki, a verdant soupy ragout with spring vegetables—like artichokes (considered a Jewish vegetable), spinach, and peas—and meat; her family, originally from Toledo, Spain, and later from Tétouan, Morocco, ate a thick meat- and- fava- bean soup. So which did she choose? Instead of picking sides, she serves both at her Seder. Now her grown children associate these soups with the taste of home. M’soki, also called béton armé (reinforced concrete) because of its heartiness, is so popular in France today that Tunisians, Algerians, and anyone who has tasted it now prepares it for Passover, and at special events throughout the year. This very ancient soup, probably dating from the eleventh century, would have included lamb, cinnamon, rose petals, and white or yellow carrots. It would not have included harissa, as peppers were a New World import.

Any soft green, such as chard leaves, may be substituted for the spinach here.