Gratin de Figues

When Elie Wiesel stopped in Bordaeux to give a speech, he asked members of the Jewish community for suggestions on where to eat. They told him to go to Jean Ramet, a marvelous thirty-seat southwestern-French restaurant. Run by a Jewish chef, it is located right down the street from the eighteenth-century Grand Théâtre. Raised in a Polish Jewish home in France, Jean doesn’t have many culinary memories from his childhood. He grew up in Vichy, where his parents, like so many other Jews returning to France after the war, had priorities other than food. But food became a career for Jean. He apprenticed at the three-star Maison Troisgros in Roanne, learning pastry skills. “Pastry-making gives you discipline; it is very important for a chef,” he told me. “You need the rules of pastry first.” In the 1970s, Jean met Tunisian-born Raymonde Chemla on a youth trip to Israel. They have now been married for more than thirty years, living mostly in Bordeaux, where they run the restaurant. On vacations, they often travel to Morocco, because they love the food of North Africa. “Moroccan food is sincere,” said Jean. “When I met Raymonde, I fell in love with North African spices, such as cinnamon, mint, and cloves.” This gratin of figs with a zabaglione sauce and a splash of orange-flower water is a dish that celebrates North African flavors and classic French techniques. It also captures the essence of the flavor of fresh fig. As the French Jewish sage Rashi so beautifully stated in his commentaries on the Bible, “Summer is the time of the gathering of the figs and the time when they dry them in the fields, and it [the dried fig] is summer.”