Salad

Tagliata refers to Italian-style steaks that are cut thin and quickly cooked—all appealing to a 30-minute girl.

Some fritters (with a few changes), different salad—all new menu!

Here’s a low-carb-lover’s delight! Have two servings —it’s good for you!

Eat well, eat more! I cut out the bun so I can have more dogs and veggies with less guilt. Chicago-style dogs are my favorites, with pickles, tomatoes, onions, mustard, and slaw on top. This salad reverses the order and piles the veggies up high underneath the dogs.

This is a recipe that Natan Holchaker, an avid cook, makes in Bordeaux. In a take on the classic frisée and lardons, Natan uses duck instead of the prohibited pork. I have found that in France even the most secular French Jews avoid pork, substituting smoked duck instead. You can also substitute turkey bacon or kosher beef fry (akin to pastrami).

Guy Weyl was a little boy during World War II, when his parents fled the Nazis, first hiding in the Dordogne and then crossing the border into Spain when France became too dangerous. They then went to Portugal, and from there took a boat to New York, where they stayed through the rest of the war. The whole time Guy was in the United States, he missed the green lentils from France. During the war, lentils were just beginning to gain popularity in New York as a wartime alternative to meat, but they still were not the delicacy they were in France. So, when Guy returned to France and went to school, he was thrilled to eat lentils again, but his schoolmates laughed at his fondness for them, because that was all they had had to eat during the war. This hasn’t lessened his ardor for the tiny green pulses, and Guy’s wife, Eveline, makes a wonderful lentil salad.

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.

The seeds of cultivated fennel, like eggplant, are said to have been brought to France by Jews and other merchants. Of course, wild fennel grows everywhere in the south of France. I have tasted this salad in many North African French homes. It is very simple, and a lovely counterpoint to all the more elaborate salads of the North African tradition. Once the fennel and celery have begun to wilt a bit, the flavors all come together. If pomegranates are not in season, substitute dried cranberries or cherries.

Chef Daniel Rose (see page 68) served the following salad with brandade potato latkes (see page 308) at his Spring Restaurant during Hanukkah. The secret to this colorful winter salad is to keep the fennel very cold. This recipe, and all Daniel Rose’s recipes, may change according to the market and ses humeurs (the chef’s moods).

“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.

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.

While attending a Catholic-Jewish wedding in Aussois, a quaint French alpine village near the Italian border, I wondered aloud to the bride’s uncle if this wasn’t the first time most of the villagers had ever met a Jew. In response, he told me this chilling story. During the Second World War, under the Italian occupation of France, 125 Jews were hidden in a house at the base of the town’s fortress, which was a confinement center. Villagers brought them a little bread and some potatoes to supplement their meager provisions. When the Italians left, the Jews were sure they were liberated and took a train home, only to run into German soldiers, who sent them all directly to Auschwitz. Even today, stories like this one are often hushed up because they are so painful to hear. Before the wedding ceremony, my husband and I sat down in a tiny café overlooking the mountains and tasted this salad with fresh lettuce, smoked salmon, tomatoes, and local walnut vinegar, a prized ingredient that I had never tasted but have since found on the Internet. Dill is such an important flavor in Jewish cooking that the French eleventh-century biblical commentator and Talmudic scholar Rashi wrote that if dill is used for flavor, a special blessing over the earth must be recited before tasting it. If, however, it is simply added to decorate the dish, it is not intended for food value, so just a general prayer over food must be recited.

Artichokes, one of my favorite vegetable, are edible thistles that were prized by the ancient Romans as food of the nobility. They have been a springtime food in the Mediterranean for thousands of years and particularly loved by Jews. Usually the French serve artichokes as a cold salad appetizer with a vinaigrette. Although I have seen this recipe in many Jewish cookbooks from North Africa, I hadn’t tasted it until Paula Wolfert cooked it for me on my PBS show, Jewish Cooking in America. It was a merveille, as my French friends would say. In the years since, I have eaten many different versions of this salad. Céline Bénitah, who lives in Annecy but came from Berkane, on the Algerian border of Morocco, said that all North African Jews who grew up in this orange- growing region have their own versions of this recipe. Hers includes saffron. Of course, this salad tastes best when fresh artichokes are used, but frozen artichoke hearts or bottoms work as well.