Lemon

In this dish, the hot pasta is served atop a mound of lemon-flavored ricotta cheese. The heat from the pasta will warm the cheese and send the lemony scent straight to your nose.

This is one of our favorite meals. The hardest part is waiting for the chicken to finish resting before we dig in. We love the slightly bitter sweetness of broccoli rabe, although if you prefer you could substitute broccoli or cauliflower. And really, the best part of this preparation is the amount of crispy chicken skin; because the bird is roasted flat, all the skin renders and crisps, which makes for an all-around better chicken.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No large sign—just a plaque next to a simple security button—tells you that this is the gate to a simple building housing the Cercle Bernard Lazare. The center was named in memory of Bernard Lazare, who, during the Dreyfus Affair, was a left-wing literary critic, anarchist, Zionist, and newspaper editor. He bravely defended Captain Dreyfus, and won over Jewish artists such as Camille Pissarro to the cause. The center sponsors Jewish cultural events, choosing not to advertise its location because of previous anti-Semitic attacks. When I entered this very bare-boned building, it was full of activity. Jeanine Franier came out of the kitchen to greet me, bringing along a waft of the delicious aromas from her oven. Every Thursday, before the center’s weekly lectures, she cooks. She believes that people listen to lecturers more attentively if they know a little food will be served. Regardless of what her staff cooks as a main course, this cheesecake from her Polish past is served for dessert. It has become an integral part of the lectures, and was published in the Cercle’s cookbook, called Quand Nos Boubés Font la Cuisine (When Grandmothers Cook), which she wrote in part as a fund-raising device, in part as a way of preserving a culture that is rapidly being forgotten. The cheesecake reminds me of many I ate all over France, including the one at Finkelsztajn’s Delicatessen in Paris. It tastes clearly of its delicate component parts, unlike the creamy block of cheesecake with a graham-cracker crust we find in the United States.

Danielle Fleischmann bakes this apple cake in the same beat-up rectangular pan that her mother used. Known as a “Jewish apple cake” because oil is substituted for butter, it is called gâteau de Hannouka in France. When Danielle makes the cake, she uses very little batter, and half sweet and half tart apples, a combination that makes a really tasty version of this simple Polish cake. Although her mother grated the apples, Danielle cuts them into small chunks. I often make it in a Bundt pan and serve it sprinkled with sugar.

Gâteau de Savoie is one of the earliest French cakes to use whipped egg whites as a leavener. Savoie is the mountainous area between Italy and France, long used as a travel route, and home to many Jews from the twelfth century on. The area was first integrated into France in 1792. The similarity between the gâteau de Savoie, pan d’España, and Italian ladyfingers (also known as savoiardi) leads me to believe that the recipe may have traveled throughout the Mediterranean with Sephardic Jews and other travelers. This sponge cake tends to dry out after only a day, but it can also absorb a large amount of liquid. Serving it with a homemade fruit syrup, or just fresh strawberries with a little sugar, will keep it moist.

This sophisticated Algerian-Parisian carrot dish, another from Jacqueline Meyer-Benichou, goes perfectly with fish or roast chicken. The sweetness of the carrots marries well with the preserved lemon.