Fruit

The aroma of rosemary is reminiscent of a pine forest. We thought it would be fun to pair this herbal aromatic note with the juicy, sweet-tart flesh of the pineapple. The effect of the controlled bruising brightens and tenderizes the pineapple while preserving its bright flavor. This pairs nicely with a variety of sweet and savory preparations. We like it with white, meaty fish like snapper and flounder or with shrimp or calamari. The pineapple is also pretty darned good with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

This preparation takes fresh strawberries to another level. Paired with whipped or sweet cream, these berries are pure indulgence. They can be served over pancakes, waffles, or French toast for brunch, spooned over pound cake, or paired with biscuits for shortcake. They can even make a relatively healthy dessert spooned over nonfat Greek yogurt with a grating of fresh cinnamon or nutmeg to liven things up.

We like these artichokes both cold and hot. The green olive brine adds a wonderful flavor. Even better, it comes free in your jar of olives. Alternatively, olive brine is now sold as its own ingredient for mixing cocktails. The artichokes are great with potato gnocchi or on top of pizza. They can be sautéed in butter or lightly breaded and deep-fried. They are delicious wrapped in pieces of prosciutto or served as a salad with sliced tomatoes and a simple lemon vinaigrette. If you don’t want the flavor of lemon in your artichokes, you can add citric acid at a ratio of 0.5 percent to your water instead to prevent oxidation.

Meyer lemons are believed to be a cross between the Mandarin orange and the common lemon. They are available seasonally and have a delicate floral aroma and less acidic juice than common Eureka lemons. Here we make a traditional lemon curd and then thin it to make the ice cream base. If you want to use just the curd, simply eliminate the milk. We use it to balance the richness of the curd and produce a smooth, creamy ice cream that is not overly heavy on the palate. The bright Meyer lemon flavor really makes this a standout.

We love the bit of heat and piquancy that is added by the Lime Pickles in this recipe. You can also buy prepared lime pickles if you’re in a pinch. This hollandaise can be substituted for regular hollandaise in almost any preparation where you want to change things up a bit. It is wonderful with vegetables, as a sauce for steaks and chops, or paired with steamed or grilled whole fish like snapper or branzino. Of course, the real star is the nutty flavor of the brown butter. This hollandaise sauce is so good you could just eat it with a spoon.

We love the dark, rich flavors of the classic dessert bananas Foster. One time when we had an overabundance of bananas we decided that creating a bread featuring these flavors would be ideal. We used muscovado sugar, an intensely flavored sweetener, to help mimic the caramelized notes of the original dish. We combined baking powder and baking soda to maximize our leavening and ensure a light, tender bread. It’s darned good all on its own, but we’ve also used it for French toast and bread pudding with fabulous results. Leftover bread can be toasted or grilled and slathered with butter for an excellent breakfast or snack.

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.

We love the complex flavors of this puree. We like to serve it with the Twice-Cooked Scallops (page 25). It also goes well with salmon, turkey, corned beef, and the Root Beer–Braised Short Ribs (page 226). The smokiness gives the mixture a rich meaty taste and enhances the sweetness of the dried fruits. Rest assured, though—even if you don’t have smoked fruits, you can use the regular dried version and still enjoy something special.

The sweet-tart flavor of these pink ribbons makes them a wonderful accent. They are fun with cheese courses where their crunch is a nice contrast to the creamy texture of the dairy. Their lightly tangy flavor is delicious with sweetbreads and game. They also make a beautiful garnish for a panna cotta, rice pudding, or slice of cheesecake. Sprinkle them with a little togarishi (a Japanese spice blend) before drying and use them to garnish crab salad. A hint of Old Bay seasoning can make them the perfect accompaniment for bay scallop risotto or fish cakes. Sprinkle them with sparkling sugar and they can become gorgeous tuiles to be eaten alone or perched on top of a sweet lemon tartlet.

Preserved lemons should be in everyone’s pantry. They taste like sunshine, adding bright acidity and color to a dish. We often mince the preserved lemon and use it to season crab salads, enrich pan sauces for fish and meat, and flavor pastas like our preserved lemon noodles. Thinly sliced and fried, they can go sweet or savory depending on how you season them. Chopped up with fresh garlic and parsley, they make a wonderful replacement for classic gremolata. Create a tangy finishing sauce for grilled meat and vegetables by mixing them with olive oil and minced herbs. You can slide them under the skin of your roast chicken for an amazing lemon chicken. Even a simple bowl of noodles with butter and cheese is given unexpected zest with the addition of some preserved lemon.

These pickled limes use Vadouvan spice blend, sometimes labeled French curry, a combination of Indian spices often including curry leaves, fenugreek, mustard seeds, coriander, shallots, and garlic. The exact blend depends on who makes it. It is aromatic and gives a haunting depth of flavor to the finished pickles. They are wonderful with fish, pork, and roasted vegetables and add a subtle tang to sauces, rice pilafs, or creamy grits. Lime pickles can be finely chopped into a condiment, used whole in braises, or thinly sliced and gently fried. Once you taste them, a world of possibilities opens up before you.

When we think of kimchi we tend to picture the classic kind found in Asian supermarkets, which is made primarily with Napa cabbage stained red from the chili powder and pungent with garlic. Interestingly, although that is indisputably the most popular variation, kimchi can be made with a wide array of vegetables and spices, with regional variations that affect the ingredients used and levels of heat and spice. Here we’ve used red cabbage for two reasons. The first is because we like its sweet flavor and slightly sturdy texture. The second, more practical, reason is that these fermented pickles are generally deemed ready when enough lactic acid is produced to change the pH from 6.5 to approximately 3.5. Red cabbage juice changes color at this pH and becomes a bright reddish-purple, giving you a visual cue when fermentation is complete. Kimchi is a surprisingly good condiment for grilled hot dogs. It is a great way to doctor up packaged ramen at home. In place of coleslaw on a sandwich, it can add an unexpected kick to anything from corned beef on rye to pulled pork on soft white bread. Its heat and tang are wonderful for cutting through rich ingredients, and as a substitute for sauerkraut in choucroute, it is utterly delicious.

Pickled watermelon rind is a classic summer condiment when the melons are in abundance. Here we’ve added our twist by using Japanese yuzu juice and rice wine vinegar to give the pickles a kick.

Visiting eighty-five-year-old Aimée Beressi and ninety-one-year-old Lydia Farahat is like crawling into a cozy casbah. Friends since they left Egypt in the late 1950s, they get together once a week at Lydia’s apartment on Rue Dragon, right near Saint-Germain-des-Prés. For more than forty years, the two have been discussing recipes, current events, and the Egypt of their childhood. When Aimée was growing up in Cairo, there was no school on Thursday, so she helped her mother and aunt make the cakes and cookies for the Sabbath. The word rosquettes, which comes from the Spanish rosquillas, refers to round cookies with a hole. Aimée still bakes a batch each week to bring to her friend of so many years.

These rosette-shaped fritters can be seen these days in bakeries all over Paris. Variously called fijuelas (Moroccan) and zeppole (Italian), they are a special-occasion food for happy celebrations, especially Rosh Hashanah. I tasted them at a wedding ceremony recently. Although they look difficult to make, they are quite easy.

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.

When I was a student in Paris, I became hooked on intensely tart yet sweet French lemon tarts, and sampled them at every pastry shop I could find. I still love them, especially when they are bitingly tart.

“I’m not much of a cook,” Michèle Weil told me as she ushered me into her charming kitchen in a residential section of Strasbourg. Fresh basil was growing on her kitchen windowsill, and paintings from the Jewish School of Paris adorned the walls. “But,” she continued, “I have to cook. All French women cook.” A full-time pediatrician and the mother of three boys, Michèle is smart enough to know she can’t do it all. On medical call before we arrived for dinner, she quickly pulled from the freezer a package of hunks of frozen salmon and cod, bought at Picard Surgelés. Then she boiled some potatoes, put the fish in the oven, and opened a carton of prepared Hollandaise sauce, which she microwaved and poured over the baked fish. Putting this together with a green salad with tomatoes and her homemade vinaigrette, she had made a quick and balanced dinner. Like all working women, Michèle has to make compromises. “My mother would never have given you frozen food,” she apologized. “But, no matter how busy I am, I would never buy desserts. I always make them,” she told me as she presented a free-form rhubarb tart that she had made before going to work. It seemed that every Jewish cook I visited in Alsace served me rhubarb, the sour-tasting sign of spring. Unlike Americans, who almost always marry tart rhubarb with strawberries and lace the two with large quantities of sugar, French cooks make a less sweet tart using only rhubarb. They peel the stalks first, which I do not. I think it might be one of those French fetishes, like always serving radishes with butter, or tomato juice with celery salt. Alsatian home cooks also serve their tart with a delicious custard topping made from cream and eggs.

In the early twentieth century, a Jewish woman named Geneviève Halévy Bizet, the mother of Marcel Proust’s friend Jacques, held one of the most popular women’s salons in Paris, depicted in Proust’s work. Gertrude Stein, the Jewish writer, along with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, hosted another famous salon, conversing with and cooking for writers and artists during the many years when they lived together in France. One of the recipes Alice liked to serve to their guests was very similar to this prune-and-fig compote. In Alsace and southern Germany, prune compote is eaten at Passover with crispy sweet chremslach, doughnutlike fritters made from matzo meal (there is a recipe for them in my book Jewish Cooking in America).

This quick passover-flan recipe came recently to Paris with North African Jews and has stayed. A quick dessert usually made with canned pineapple, it is even better with fresh. Because it can be prepared two days in advance, and left in the mold until serving, the flan is popular for Sabbath-observant Jews.