Tagine au Poulet et aux Coings

While her husband was on a fall Sunday ramble with friends, Anne-Juliette Belicha gave me a cooking lesson in their fifteenth-century house overlooking the fields in the Dordogne countryside. The house is located on the outskirts of Montagnac, right near the caves of Lascaux, renowned for their prehistoric animal paintings. In the kitchen hang photos of the woman who owned the house at the turn of the century, who tended geese for foie gras and to provide goose fat for the winter. Because quinces were in season, Anne-Juliette decided to cook us one of her Algerian husband’s beloved Rosh Hashanah dishes, from a book that is also one of my favorites—150 Recettes et Mille et Un Souvenirs d’une Juive d’Algerie by Léone Jaffin. The quince, believed to be the Biblical “apple” of the Garden of Eden by some scholars, is a complex fruit. Hard to peel and quarter, quinces require careful handling. Once peeled, they darken rather quickly, so you need to keep them in water mixed with a little lemon juice. Anne-Juliette picked the quinces from a friend’s tree and used an old variety of onions—a cross between onions and shallots—that she bought at a nearby farmers’ market. As she cooked, first frying the onions and then the kosher chickens that she buys in Paris, she told us about her dream: to open a kosher bed-and-breakfast in the Dordogne.