“In my family, we are rather modest, and making food is a way of saying I love you. Everyone cooks in my house: young people, old people, women, men, those who know and those who don’t know. I grew up in the 10e district of Paris, in a non-practicing Tunisian Jewish family, where we happily mix Sephardic dishes, butter or cream recipes and Italian specialties.
The kitchen is a place of life, of sharing, of joy, of experimentation, not at all solemn – it is the place where we confide in each other, where we do our homework, where we exchange ideas. first kisses. Like my sister Chloé, who became a chef, I learned to cook by observing, by improvising, by making mistakes, by starting again. I love entertaining and cooking, I invite my friends to dinner every Sunday evening.
I take advantage of being on tour to discover the regions, the markets, I bring back products from the places where I play. I make blanquettes, bourguignons, baked fish with lots of vegetables, savory tarts with leftovers… I like to adapt, cook cheerful, simple and tasty things.
Breadcrumbs are the poor man’s parmesan
Beyond recipes, I cook and write to find something that takes me back somewhere. A taste, a smell, a moment. I try to recreate a memory, like the recipe for the breaded tuna sandwich, wolfed down in Madrid with my best friend on a hungover day, or my grandmother’s little butter and jam shortbreads from Yom Kippur. I thought they were common to all Jewish families, served before and after the couscous at the end of the fast.
But, in Jewish tradition, we do not eat dairy products right after meat and we do not mix them either. I later realized that these shortbreads were more Italian than anything else. My grandmother, fascinated by Italy, had made them her own, and then she didn’t care a little about the rites, what mattered was above all that it was good and shared. Shortbread has become part of my family’s history, it has become our tradition.
I named my last album Bomboloni, firstly because I find this magnificent word, which means “donut” among the Italians and which is a national emblem for the Tunisians. But also because he has a taste for the tender memories of childhood, celebrations and joy. Just like spaghetti with merguez, our Sunday evening dish, a family and popular tradition, which tells of immigration and the mixing of cultures.
It always seemed normal to me to put merguez in pasta “with sauce”, as we call them at my house, and it’s so great to add a little breadcrumbs to make it crunchy, like my grandfather did. Breadcrumbs are the poor man’s parmesan. It’s a way to keep the sun, the joy, to be resilient, to do a lot with a little. That’s what I wanted to put in this book, where I cook and where I also tell lots of personal stories. Motherhood, family, the bitterness, the acidities and the crunch of life. »
Cooking the sun, by Aurélie Saada, Hachette Pratique, 208 p., €39.95.