Joan Nathan: Tales from a Jewish Cooking Icon

Her 12th cookbook, a career-capping memoir with recipes, arrives in time for Passover

“For the blessings over the bread, symbolic of the manna distributed in the desert on Friday, but more so of the comfort of family, faith, and community, we all join in, holding the challah or touching someone holding it, to make an unbroken chain connecting us to the food that comes from the earth. Then we tear it apart to share and to eat. For that minute when we are holding the fresh bread with its wonderful aroma, we are all united. Friends are family.”

Joan Nathan, My Life in Recipes

Joan Nathan books in my library. A sabbath challah is visible on the covers of each. I’ve been making her challah recipes for years—though not next week, because it’s Passover!

When your favorite cookbook is falling apart in your hands, requiring yet another round of cellophane first aid, it’s time to order replacement copy—or, better yet, a new cookbook from the same beloved author.

That’s exactly what I did a couple of weeks back when I discovered that Joan Nathan’s latest book, My Life in Recipes: Food, Family and Memories, had just been released. I already owned three of Nathan’s¹ cookbooks, with the disintegrating one, The Jewish Holiday Kitchen (first published in 1979, though my paperback edition was issued in 1988), my most treasured of all, mainly for sentimental reasons. It’s the one I purchased when my son Sam was just two years old and cooked from most frequently. At the time I hoped to recreate the Jewish holiday and everyday dishes I remembered from childhood or wanted to learn—and, if I was lucky, to pass them on to a new generation.

These much-loved pages in The Jewish Holiday Kitchen cookbook, offer several versions of matzo ball soup. The matzo balls—which my German relatives (and Joan Nathan) called “kneydlakh” (or Knödel in German)—are similar to those I grew up eating on Passover.

Even though I had watched my mother make matzo ball soup, latkes and hamantaschen, I didn’t take notes and didn’t really know how to make them. When I turned to The Jewish Holiday Kitchen (and later to Nathan’s other cookbooks and to her many online recipes), I found step-by-step directions and was also introduced to a wide array of recipes for special occasions and everyday.

Looking back, I’m amazed to realize that before anyone had ever heard of hummus, falafel and fesenjan (a pomegranate, walnut and chicken dish from northern Iran), Joan Nathan was already writing about them! Her curiosity, persistence and admiration for wide-ranging customs, foods and traditions got her invited into every home and to every table—and not only Jewish ones, as books like An American Folklife Cookbook (1984) and The New American Cooking (2005) attest.

Hummus with Preserved Lemon and Cumin from Joan Nathan’s 2017 book, King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World. (A link to the recipe here.) Previous books had other versions—she is always updating her recipes incorporating new ingredients (like preserved lemon) or revising techniques.

Along with the recipes, Nathan shared stories, history and the religious significance of the dishes and the ingredients they contained. Sometimes she included recipes from German Jewish relatives on her father’s side which reminded me of some I knew from my dad’s family—among them, zwetschgenkuchen (German plum tart) and sauerbraten (a marinated beef roast).

Little Joan sitting on her father’s lap during her grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary celebration. Ernest Nathan came to America in 1929 at age 24. He already knew that “Germany was no place for a Jew,” and helped bring over his parents, sisters and their families. But there were other relatives he couldn't rescue. “Twenty-eight people from just the Nathan line of my family perished in various death camps,” wrote his daughter. (Photo from My Life in Recipes)

In later books there were deeper dives into the stories behind the dishes and the lives and backgrounds of the people who made them, often Eastern European Jews who had come to America in the late 19th and early 20th century and brought their food traditions with them. Her writing and reporting reflected Nathan’s skills as a journalist—she has been a longstanding contributor to the The New York Times, Tablet magazine and earlier in her career to The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.

A book to savor

This week when I picked up my beloved copy of Jewish Holiday Kitchen, the section that begins at the Rosh Hashanah recipe for “Aunt Lisl’s Apple Pie” and ends at “Passover Popovers” and matzo balls pulled right out of the spine—like a piece of challah from a loaf. I taped it back in, but I was very glad to have a brand new Joan Nathan book (loaf!) to tear into (but hopefully not destroy!) when I finally received my copy of My Life in Recipes!

Correspondence Joan Nathan saved from the likes of Julia Child, Judith Jones, Maida Heatter and Diana Kennedy, along with letters she wrote to her parents, diaries she kept, and more are printed on the endpapers of My Life in Recipes and were a valuable resource in writing it.

The book turns out to be a wonderful read indeed. If you’re going to write a memoir, it certainly pays to save every scrap of paper, letter, diary, article, family record and recipe card ever sent, received or scribbled (including a penciled note signed by Marilyn Monroe, who just happened to be visiting your friend’s house in 1956!). Of course it also pays to have a good memory, an insatiable curiosity, an eventful, well-traveled life, hail from a fascinating family and be a marvelous raconteur who knows and has met everybody who’s anybody!

Joan Nathan’s grandmother Lina’s German dollhouse kitchen that she received on her sixth birthday in 1880 and passed on to her own daughter Trudel, Joan’s aunt. Trudel took it with her, along with “beautifully penned” family cookbooks when she fled Germany in 1937. Now Nathan’s own granddaughters play with it. (Photo from My Life in Recipes)

She begins her story with her immigrant roots—her German-born grandparents, father and aunts and her American-born mother whose immigrant parents raised her to be “an American girl”; growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, and in Larchmont, New York; her first adventure abroad at 17 in Grenoble, France, where she developed an appreciation for French food, art and travel and returning later for her junior year while a student at the University of Michigan (where she first discovered Ann Arbor Schnecken, pecan sticky buns!). In the letters home from France, food is always front and center, including the first one she sent to her parents in 1963:

“We do have the best table, I would say. At dinner I sat next to one of the French men who explained many of the social amenities to me. We had lobster, duck, les petits pois, le fromage. There are at least 7 courses but it’s impossible to choose all of them. We finished with champagne which was délicieux.”

Skipping a lot here (me, not Joan Nathan!), she talks about her journey to becoming the storied “doyenne,” “of Jewish cooking, traveling all over the world and around the U.S. in quest of stories and recipes; being inspired and then becoming friends with fellow culinary luminaries, including Julia Child with whom she shared the same legendary editor, Judith Jones; Diana Kennedy, the intrepid Mexican food writer; M.F.K. Fisher, with whom Nathan did a Q&A for The Washington Post Magazine in 1986 while her infant son David napped and her husband Allan Gerson photographed the ailing writer and made her an omelet, (“the only food item he knew how to cook in all the years we were married,” Nathan said). Of course, there’s a recipe for the omelet in the book, too!

Nathan, who has been referred to as “the Jewish Julia Child,” admired the French cooking icon for being a lifelong learner—which Nathan also clearly is. Child, who pioneered cooking shows on PBS, appeared on an episode called “What Is Kosher?” on Jewish Cooking in America with Joan Nathan, a popular show that aired on PBS in the late 90’s, more than three decades after The French Chef,” debuted on public television. Nathan observed that Julia Child’s curiosity, like her own, extended beyond food.

“Once, in her late eighties, Julia had an operation and was confined to bed in the hospital for a few weeks. ‘Time to learn the computer,’ she wrote me in already shaky handwriting. And she did.”

Allan, Joan, Julia and Joan and Allan’s son David at a 90th birthday party for Julia at their home in Washington, D.C. Nervous about what to serve Julia Child at the party, she and her son spent the whole summer planning the menu. One dish was salmon baked with preserved lemon and za’atar, a recipe that is in the new book.

An origin story

Accolades for My Life in Recipes and for 81-year-old Joan Nathan have been nonstop since its release, but they’ve really been coming for years for the woman who has been writing about Jewish cooking the world over for half a century. It began when she moved to Jerusalem in 1970 at age 26, eventually finding a job as foreign press attaché for Teddy Kollek, then mayor of the city.

On the job working for Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek in the early 1970s. (Photo from My Life in Recipes)

She learned firsthand about this city and its disparate groups and conflicting interests, and rubbed shoulders with leading political lights of the day, including Israel’s first prime minister, 84-year-old David Ben-Gurion. She also acquired a taste for the diverse foods of the area—Armenian stuffed grape leaves, Kurdish soups, Moroccan-Jewish slowly cooked stuffed vegetables. Eggplant became a particular favorite:

“Eggplant-and-pepper kugels, eggplant soufflés, and salad of either roasted or fried eggplant. I began to think of Jerusalem as the epicenter of eggplant preparation.”

Included in the book are two eggplant recipes: baba ghanouj (eggplant with tahini, lemon juice and garlic) and eggplant rounds topped with tahini, yogurt and pomegranates.

Eggplant Rounds Topped with Tahini, Yogurt, and Pomegranates (Photo from My Life in Recipes)

Even in a deeply divided city, in those days, there was the possibility of finding common ground. One day Nathan accompanied her boss on an excursion to an Arab village halfway between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The mission was to tactfully say no to the villagers’ request for a new road—too costly. After rounds of Turkish coffee while continuing to say no to the project, the host brought out a delicious feast of chicken, sumac, pine nuts and onions served on large slices of pita bread soaked in olive oil and warmed in the oven. Nathan described what happened afterwards:

By the time we had eaten our fill of the chicken and were sipping our mint tea, everyone had gotten what they wanted: The mayor got fed probably one of the finest meals of his life. The village? They got their road. And me? Well, I got a lifelong career. That meal showed me how food can break down barriers and bring people together. I understood then that food is not ornamental—it is central, and worthy of study—and that I could explore the world through food. I also got my favorite chicken dish.”

—Joan Nathan, My Life in Recipes

I can’t wait to make this dish, which is called Mousakhan. When I do, I’ll share the results. Meanwhile, here’s a link to the recipe, very close to the one in this book, that Nathan published in Tablet magazine. Wouldn't it be great if this dish, which in the Tablet piece is referred to as “Palestinian chicken,” and others like it that cross borders, might work their magic and bring peace between warring peoples? But perhaps that’s too much to ask of a simple dish!

The Flavor of Jerusalem, Joan Nathan’s first book.

It was also in Jerusalem that Nathan first came up with the idea to “write a book about all the people of the city, using food to tell their stories.”

She and her then colleague and co-writer, Judy Stacey Goldman, initially thought they would invite the foreign press and their wives (apparently all members of the press were male in those days!) to give cooking lessons in their homes so that the two women could get to know them through their recipes.

“We did this as a lark, and it turned into a profession for me. I watched home cooks make hummus, stuff vegetables for ancient Kurdish and Moroccan delicacies, and so much more, learning their techniques and tricks. That’s how I have learned to cook through all these years—not by professional training—and I still bring each person into the kitchen with me every time I make their recipes.”

—Joan Nathan, My Life in Recipes

Nathan, who had two masters degrees, one in French literature from the University of Michigan, and a second in public administration from Harvard University, hadn’t intended a career in food writing, but it turned out to combine three of her key interests—people, food and travel.

In the course of her life, as she details in her book, she traveled the world and the U.S. in search of stories and recipes, joining people in their kitchens, bakeries, storefronts, then putting her findings into her books, earning multiple top culinary prizes and accolades along the way.

Her 1998 PBS television series, Jewish Cooking in America with Joan Nathan (which I have just started watching on YouTube) was nominated in 2000 for the James Beard Award for Best National Television Food Show, while the excellent book on which it was based, Jewish Cooking in America, was named a “Culinary Classic” by the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals) in 2017 after winning both a James Beard Award for the best American cookbook and the IACP/Julia Child Cookbook of the Year Award. (You can read about all her many awards at JoanNathan.com.) In My Life in Recipes, Nathan shares more behind-the-scenes tales of how the book and show were shepherded into existence (hint: Judith Jones had a major role.)

With the first night of Passover arriving this Monday night (April 22), I’m sharing an episode titled “The Food of Passover” from the show that features a charming and funny octogenarian, Dora Solganik, from Cleveland, Ohio, who was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and demonstrates making gefilte fish, as she learned to do it as a child. Also on the show is handsome Mandy Patinkin making apple and nut haroset (sometimes spelled charoset), one of the symbolic foods of the Passover seder plate, with his mother and son. This is the classic haroset that I grew up eating!

Want to dine with Joan Nathan?

As an early birthday treat (thank you, Tina!), I’ve been invited to a shabbat dinner with Joan Nathan (and some of her L.A. family, friends and fans!) tomorrow evening (Friday, April 19, which may be already past by the time you read this—sorry!) at Lulu. That’s the elegant new restaurant inside the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, founded in 2021 by Alice Waters, the legendary pioneer behind Berkeley’s Chez Panisse and a longtime Nathan friend.

Nathan is also discussing food memoirs at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday, April 20, at 4 p.m. You can find the rest of her book tour schedule at her Instagram site here.

I’ll have a special bonus Passover edition for you on Sunday, including a recipe or two. Thanks as always for reading, liking, subscribing and sharing!

Ruth

1. I’ve been going back and forth about whether to call Joan Nathan “Joan,” but as we only met once when she signed two of my books (Thanks, Joan!), I’m sticking to the journalistic style of calling those you’re writing about by their last names.