North African

“I so miss Shabbat meals in France,” a young North African man from Marseille living in Washington told me when we were seated next to each other on a plane. “My mother never makes fewer than ten to fifteen salads.” One of these salads might be a combination of oranges and olives. It is very refreshing, and looks beautiful as one of many Moroccan salads. The black and orange colors remind me of black-eyed Susans. Prepared with argan oil, which comes from argan pits harvested from the argan tree, the salad is balanced with the oranges and grapefruit. These are all 2,000-year-old Moroccan flavors.

Little Tunis and the multicultural and bustling Belleville market in Paris are populated with French farmers and merchants from North Africa. In the restaurants and stores bordering the market, you feel as if you are in North Africa, as Tunisians and others congregate at kosher and halal restaurants, bars, and bakeries. You also feel the influence of the Italian tenure in Tunisia: Italian bread, beignets shaped like the Italian manicotti, and canned tuna in olive oil. An everyday snack that Jews and Muslims make from the ingredients found in this market is a large brik filled with parsley, tuna, and a raw egg, then quickly deep-fried and served with a salad called mechouia. The word mechouia, which means “grilled” in Arabic, can be applied to grilling an entire lamb or just the vegetables that go with it. Some sprinkle salt on the grill to keep away the evil eye. The trick to making a good mechouia is grilling more tomatoes than peppers. To retain the flavor of both vegetables, sprinkle them with salt after they are grilled and peeled, and let them drain overnight, to help the water seep out. In the market, Tunisians use corne-de-boeuf peppers, the ones they grew up with in Tunisia, but you can substitute Anaheim peppers, which are very similar, or others.

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.

This is one of the salads that I make frequently. For some reason, although people always ask me how I make it, I have never put the recipe in any of my cookbooks. Grilling the peppers softens the pulp and brings out the natural sweetness. Sometimes the peppers are mixed with eggplants and tomatoes in North African salads, such as the salade juive (recipe follows) or the tchoukchouka (see page 94). Sometimes they are served alone. For Rosh Hashanah and dinner parties, I love to serve the colorful combination of red peppers, carrot salad (see page 112), and roasted beet salad (see page 108).

When I embark on a cookbook, it’s like going on a scavenger hunt. One clue leads to another. Sometimes they lead to unexpected findings, such as this wonderful cooked salad of Jewish origins. Someone in Washington had told me that Élisabeth Bourgeois, the chef and owner of Le Mas Tourteron, a restaurant just outside of Gordes, in the Lubéron, was Jewish. One Sunday afternoon, a friend and I drove two hours from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence to the charming stone house with old wooden beams and antique furniture that is her restaurant. Although I had no idea what mas tourteron meant, an atmosphere of bonhomie filled this farmhouse (mas) of lovebirds (tourterons) as soon as Élisabeth and her husband greeted us. When I explained my quest to Élisabeth, asking her if she was Jewish, she replied, “Pas du tout” (“Not at all”). I thought our journey would be for naught, but since we arrived at lunchtime, we sat down to eat. And what a meal we had! Our first course was a trio of tiny late-summer vegetables served in individual cups on a long glass platter: a cucumber salad with crème fraîche and lots of chives and mint; a cold zucchini cream soup; and a luscious ratatouille-like tomato salad, the third member of the trio. When I asked Élisabeth for the recipe for this last dish, she said without hesitation, “Ça, c’est la salade juive!” (“That is the Jewish salad!”) She explained that the recipe came from a Moroccan Jewish woman who had worked in her kitchen for about thirty years. Now it is part of her summer cooking repertoire and mine. This recipe calls for coriandre, a word that the French use for both the fresh leaves and the seeds of the coriander or cilantro plant. This dish uses both. I serve it either as a salad or as a cold pasta sauce, and make it during every season, even with canned tomatoes in winter. It is always a hit.

Eveline Weyl remembers growing up in France with a green-wheat soup, served every Friday evening. “We called it gruen kern or soupe au blé vert, and it was made, basically, by simmering onions and carrots and using green wheat to thicken the broth,” she told me. “My mother said it was very healthy for us children.” I asked all over for a recipe for this dish but couldn’t find one. Then, watching a Tunisian videographer from Paris taking photographs of his mother making soup, I realized that the soup Tunisians call shorbat freekeh, made with parched wheat, is nearly the same as the green-wheat soup for which I had been searching. Young green wheat is available at select health-food stores these days, and made into juice. Ferik or freekeh is the parched substitute. I like this soup so much that I often use barley, bulgur, wheat berries, or lentils if I can’t find the green wheat. In fourteenth-century Arles, Jews ate many different kinds of grains and legumes. Chickpeas, which came from the Middle East, and green wheat were probably two of them. The original recipe for this soup called for lamb bones, but I prefer a vegetarian version. The tomato paste is, of course, a late addition.

This Tunisian holiday chicken soup that Yael calls consommé nikitouche is filled with little dumplings that have become so popular in France because of the growing Tunisian population. Nikitouches, similar in size to Israeli couscous, are today prepackaged. When presenting this recipe for her blog, Yael wrote, “It is winter; you are feeling feverish. Nothing replaces the nikitouche soup of our grandmothers.” Here it is. Just remember that you must start the recipe two nights ahead.

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 haroset recipe originated in Toledo, Spain, before the Inquisition, and found its way to Tétouan, near Tangier, in northern Morocco, and then to Paris, where it is served today. Dates, the predominant fruit in most Moroccan haroset, are mixed with apples before being rolled into little balls. Sylviane Lévy (see page 65), whose mother gave her the recipe, says to roll them in cinnamon, then serve them in little paper cups. These balls look like chocolate truffles and taste like Passover petits fours!

Once, while visiting Le Monde des Épices (see page 26), I asked the owner which Jewish cookbook in his large selection he especially liked. His favorite one at the time was 150 Recettes et Mille et Un Souvenirs d’une Juive d’Algérie (150 Recipes and 1,001 Memories of an Algerian Jewish Woman) by Léone Jaffin, one of the steady stream of North African Jewish cookbooks since the 1970s. This book includes such unusual recipes as these Swiss-chard bestels, traditionally eaten on Rosh Hashanah. North African Jews frequently use the bright-green leaves of beets or Swiss chard, called blette. A prayer is recited over the vegetable, called salek in Hebrew, meaning to remove or throw out, with the hope that in the coming year enemies will be removed from the community’s midst. I have added curry powder, pine nuts, and currants to this tasty turnover, which I sometimes serve with salad as a first course.

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.

Brik are crisp, flaky appetizers found in Tunisian, Algerian, and Moroccan kitchens in France. The word refers to the dough, similar to the Moroccan warka, which one makes by tossing fistfuls of a wet, pastelike batter onto a hot grill. The batter miraculously spreads into a thin, pliable sheet, which may be used as an appetizer or dessert wrapper. You can find unbaked feuilles de brik (brik leaves) in Middle Eastern food stores or online (see A Source Guide, page 370). If you can’t, use wonton wrappers instead, or even phyllo dough, although your finished product will not have the same grainy texture as real brik. I often make these filled pastries as an appetizer at Hanukkah, instead of potato pancakes.

A famous North African specialty with an exciting bittersweet flavor.

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.

Although not my favorite pastry, makroud is very popular in North Africa, especially in Tunisia, which is a land of dates. The pastries are usually deep-fried in oil, then dipped in warm honey. I prefer the lighter baked version.

These most famous of Moroccan pastries are best known abroad by their French name, cornes de gazelle or gazelle’s horns. Stuffed with ground-almond paste and curved into horn-shaped crescents, they are ubiquitous wedding-party fare. I have eaten some with a very thin hard crust, and some with a thicker, crumbly crust. This one, made with eggs rather than butter, is thin and crisp.

This Moroccan pastry is a very long coil (hence the name m’hencha, meaning “snake”) of fillo pastry filled with a ground-almond paste. It is stunning to look at and exquisite. I give very large quantities, because it is the thing to make for a grand occasion, but of course you can make it smaller and reduce the quantities. The flavor is better if you grind the blanched almonds yourself rather than use commercially ground ones.

In Morocco, they make this elegant couscous with small Mediterranean pigeons, but squabs and small poussins will also do.

This Algerian couscous is like a fish soup served over the grain. Small fish are left whole and large ones are cut into steaks, but I prefer to use fillets, because it is unpleasant to deal with fish bones here. Use firm white fish such as turbot, bream, cod, haddock, and monkfish.

Tunisia is famous for fish couscous. This uncommon one is elegant and aromatic, with the mingled scents of saffron and quince. Have the fish cleaned and left whole. It is usually steamed in a separate steamer, but it is better to bake it in foil in the oven, which is a way of steaming it.

You can use any firm white fish, such as cod, bream, hake, or haddock, for this Algerian couscous.

This is the most famous Moroccan couscous, which you can improvise around. It can be made with lamb or chicken or with a mix of the two. In local lore, the number seven has mystical qualities. It brings good luck. Choose seven vegetables out of those listed—onions and tomatoes do not count as vegetables but as flavorings, so choose seven more. It is a long list of ingredients, but the making of the dish is simple—a matter of throwing things into a pot—and it feeds a big party. The soup or stew can be prepared well in advance, and so can the grain.

In Morocco it is poor food eaten hot with bread. A grander version with saffron is served as a first course. You may use canned chickpeas. The same can also be done with white cannelini beans, dried or canned.

This version of the Tunisian meshweya (page 85) can be served hot or cold. I prefer it cold.