It's early afternoon in Massachusetts, and Joan Nathan, 81, is in the kitchen of her summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, preparing a meal for her family who will be visiting soon.
Joan and Allan in Siena, Italy
Photos courtesy of Joan Nathan
Bringing people together through the joy of food is the essence of Nathan’s career as a food writer and author of 12 cookbooks, including her latest, “My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories” (Knopf, April 9, 2024). A columnist for The New York Times, Nathan’s new cookbook contains 100 recipes and takes readers on a culinary journey that spans the globe as she looks back at her life, career and family history.
Shortly after her husband of 45 years, Allan Gerson, passed away in 2019, Nathan was inspired to write a memoir-cookbook.
“My editor liked the idea, and I decided to write a book that tells the story of my life, my family’s recipes and how I became a food writer,” Nathan says. “Each chapter is a story about the foods and recipes I’ve discovered during the different stages of my life.”
Nathan says writing the book and including stories of her travels with Gerson, a prominent attorney, served as a form of therapy as she grieved his death.
In 2019, they celebrated Gerson’s last birthday in Israel, surrounded by family.
Joan with Alice Waters and José Andrés on stage at Sips & Suppers in Washington, D.C.
“We took our children, their spouses and our grandchildren to Israel for Allan’s 74th birthday,” Nathan says in her book. “Allan and I met in Israel and had been there many times through the years, trying to show our children what it meant to us and what we hoped it would mean to them.”
As an authority on global Jewish cuisine, Nathan, who splits her time between Washington, D.C., and Martha’s Vineyard, enjoys discovering the history behind Jewish recipes and how they connect with different cultures.
As an example, she notes how ghoribiya, the shortbread-like butter cookies her family enjoyed at Gerson’s 74th birthday party, also share similarities with polvorones (cookies found in Mexico and Spain) and vanillekipferl, a buttery almond cookie made in Austria.
Allan, Joan, Julia Child and Joan's son David at Julia's 90th birthday party in Joan's home
“Everyone has a story of food, and I happen to be one of the lucky people who has six cookbooks handwritten by relatives through the years,” Nathan says. “My father left Germany in 1929, and my husband was Polish, yet they both had stories of their favorite foods that later became a part of my life.”
Giving Older Recipes A New Life
Nathan prides herself not only on resurrecting older recipes but also giving them a new twist in the process. She acknowledges that families today are busy and seek recipes that are healthy and don’t require hours in the kitchen.
In Ouarzazate, Morocco
“My children like to cook and have people over to their homes, but they do more potlucks and eat much less meat than I ever did,” she says.
Realizing that many have embraced plant-based diets, Nathan’s new book introduces a recipe for vegan matzo ball soup. For meat lovers, she also includes a traditional matzo ball recipe with chicken.
Learning to make Ethiopian coffee with Chef Amy Brandwein
To demonstrate how the vegan version is made, Nathan joined actress Natalie Portman, who is vegan, on her Instagram Live show, “Natalie’s Table,” in 2020. She revealed that the secret to making vegan matzo balls is chickpeas. Portman gave the vegan recipe high praise, saying it brought her “comfort and joy.”
Noting that her three adult children all like to make challah on Friday nights, Nathan devised a recipe that uses olive oil instead of vegetable oil. While Nathan prefers the taste of olive oil, she says it’s also been shown to have many nutritional benefits.
Even the matzo ball soup recipe her mother once made has evolved with Nathan adding nutmeg and ginger to the recipe, ingredients her father’s family used in Germany.
A Legacy Of Food Memories
A self-taught chef who discovered a passion for cooking in a middle school home economics class in Larchmont, N.Y., Nathan remembers watching her mom make special dishes such as a plum kuchen, a classic German cake, for the Jewish High Holidays.
Syrian cooks in Istanbul sharing their recipes with Joan
While she always enjoyed good food and cooking, she earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in french literature from the University of Michigan in the late 1960s and after college, moved to New York City. Years later, she attended Harvard University, where she earned a second master’s degree in public administration.
“I worked a variety of jobs, including one at NBC as a telephone girl in the newsroom, and I started writing just for fun,” she says. “Nobody had money to dine out at restaurants then, but we did have recipes. Craig Claiborne was a food editor and restaurant critic for The New York Times, and I found myself making a lot of his recipes.”
In 1970, Nathan moved to Israel, accepting a job offer as the foreign press officer for the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek.
Friends and family at Allan's final birthday in Rosh Pina, Israel
“And as press attaché, I would invite journalists to dinner and try out different recipes,” Nathan says. “I was also invited into people’s homes where I learned how to cook just by observing them. While I was in Jerusalem, I even wrote my first cookbook, ‘The Flavor of Jerusalem,’ on a whim.”
With her inquisitive spirit, Nathan became fascinated by watching others create dishes and hearing the stories behind the recipes. She relishes the stories of home chefs and hearing how different dishes were passed down from one generation to the next.
“I would watch the hostess cook a meal, and then I’d go home and replicate the recipe, adding my own touches,” Nathan says. “Just this week, a guest made a delicious fish entrée that was influenced in part by his Algerian background. He and his wife have made it part of their repertoire and it was delicious.”
During her travels to destinations including India, Mexico, China and Vietnam, Nathan has learned how many dishes served in these countries have connections to Judaism.
Joan in her garden
“While we were in Vietnam, we went to this island and learned about the origin of fish sauce,” she says. “I realized fish sauce probably originated in the East before becoming a delicacy in ancient Rome. Hearing these types of stories makes food come alive for me.”
The Julia Child Of Jewish Food
Over the years, Nathan’s reputation as a Jewish chef grew along with her career. In 1994, she published “Jewish Cooking in America,” which immediately became an American classic, and went on to win a James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook. The success of her book also led to a PBS television series, “Cooking in America with Joan Nathan.”
Although she’s been dubbed “The Julia Child of Jewish Food,” Nathan believes her cookbooks appeal to a large audience of home chefs who relish traditions, history and good food.
“When the book was released, not only did Jewish families begin using it, but also so many other cooks,” she says. “I’m very interested in my American, German, Polish and Jewish roots and they all come together in my cooking.”
Some of Nathan’s favorite dishes are her roast chicken stuffed with preserved lemons and herbs and salmon with za’atar (a Middle Eastern spice combination) with wild thyme and preserved lemons, which she made for Julia Child’s 90th birthday.
“Julia was an inspiration, and I learned so much from her,” Nathan says. “She was a lifelong learner and one of those people who never said no to life. I remember when she was in her 80s and needed an operation and said, ‘Well, my recovery period will be a good time to learn how to use a computer.’”
Cooking With Family
Nathan’s next project will be updating her book “The Children’s Jewish Holiday Kitchen.” She remembers making recipes from the book with her three children, Daniela, Merissa and David, when the book was first published in 1987. Now, she enjoys spending time in the kitchen baking with her grandchildren, 6-year-old twins Aviv and Alma.
Family, she says, is at the heart of every good meal, and she encourages others to preserve their own family recipes so they can be shared with future generations.
In her cookbook “King Solomon’s Table,” Nathan remembers asking a chef why he was making an old family recipe, and he answered, “It’s not the taste I’m searching for but the memories.”