A few years before my grandmother Bev passed away in 2016, I asked her to show me how to make challah, one of her impressive cooking repertoire. She stepped into her kitchen cabinet and pulled out, to her surprise, not a handwritten recipe, but a yellowed newspaper clipping. At the time, I felt vaguely deprived of something, but years later, I released my obsession with the romance of her family's recipes. I didn't make copies of the cutouts or pay special attention to her grandmother's techniques. (Except for one thing: When fermenting the dough, she pushed the mixing bowl into the bed and turned on the electric blanket.) What she conveyed to me, though intangible, was definitely It was more important: a love of cooking and eating and entertaining. , especially when celebrating Jewish holidays. For everything else, there's Joanne Nathan.
You could also argue that Nathan is a household name as long as you're referring to Jewish-American families. Even if a Jewish home cook doesn't own a copy of The Jewish Holiday Kitchen (1979) or American Jewish Cooking (1994), he or she has at least encountered Nathan's dozens of recipes. You've probably seen it before. times, and probably tried her latkes or brisket. Nathan has often been called the Jewish Julia Child. Coincidentally, she knew Child well. The two women collaborated with the late legendary cookbook editor Judith Jones (also known for rescuing Anne Frank's Diary from the Doubleday waste heap), along with Madhur Jaffrey. In 2002, Nathan, a longtime D.C. socialite, hosted Child's 90th birthday party the night before the Smithsonian opened an exhibit showcasing the contents of Child's iconic kitchen. This is the story from Nathan's latest cookbook, My Life in Recipes, which doubles as a detailed memoir. The party menu included fresh corn with pesto butter, which was a hit with the guests of honor. “Julia absolutely loved this dish,” Nathan writes. “She sprinkled the corn with pesto and ate it deliciously.''
The cover of My Life in Recipes shows a large, seemingly homemade chara (knitted, but slightly misshapen and torn at the seams) placed on a well-worn wooden cutting board. ) and a photo of Nathan's finger about to be torn off. End of bread. “The kids said, 'Mom, this is not a beautiful challah!'” she told me in her kitchen in Washington, D.C., on a Thursday morning a few weeks ago. Nathan, 81, has a strong, angular face and thick curly hair, but she says she is more interested in her hands. “It's so old!” she said. But her editor reassured her, insisting, “It was her weathered hands that did something terrible.” That morning, Nathan had prepared more of her dough, heaping sticky-topped domes into large bowls. She made two loaves as she worked carefully. One was her traditional six-braid loaf, and hers was a pull-apart monkey bread style with round balls lined up inside a cake pan.
From an early age, Nathan felt strongly about the importance of preserving culinary traditions. Her home office houses her most treasured family heirlooms. It's a stunningly detailed miniature kitchen with a once-functioning electric stove that her aunt Trudel packed into a shipping container when her family fled Germany for the United States in the 1930s. is. Several leather-bound recipe books. One of her recipes for these, sweet and sour salmon made with lemon, ginger and brown sugar, is included in the early chapters of the new book, starting with Nathan's childhood and focusing on his core memories (then, age, etc.) ) has been inserted. At the age of 13, she met Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe at a friend's house in Larchmont, New York, and enjoyed a savory noodle kugel like the one her mother made and the family she knew from Germany. They learned how to make Albert Einstein's favorite strawberry and cream dessert. .
In 1969, a Peace Corps volunteer sitting next to him on a plane told him that Israel was the most fascinating place he had ever been to, which would define the rest of Nathan's life at the age of 26. He began his journey to Jerusalem. . Fascinated in no small part by the breadth of her cuisine, from Moroccan stuffed vegetables to Kurdish Aramaic soups, she moved to Jerusalem and accepted a job as foreign press secretary for then-Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Korek. She led a group of important people including: David Ben-Gurion and Barbra Streisand are touring the city. Nathan and her colleagues came up with the idea of inviting foreign journalists to their homes for cooking lessons. It was the inspiration for Taste of Jerusalem, a book of recipes by Jewish, Christian and Muslim cooks that vividly and humorously captures the city's diversity. (By Nathan's own admission, Golda Meir's matzo balls were “very rigid and inflexible, like her foreign policy,” but she still included the recipe.)
It's a job and a project you can easily imagine her working on, fueled by her ferocious curiosity and almost aggressive charm. Nathan is a major league gambler and the most knowledgeable of the Yenta. During the day I spent with her, many times she reached for the phone and cold called the person she was talking to. Even if it was her son, David, a film director. Glenn Roberts, aka Los Angeles, founder of heirloom grain company Anson Mills, enlisted Nathan's help in developing recipes using ancient cover crops as part of a climate recovery plan. “Ask if Podesta has contacted you,” she instructed me, leaving Roberts on speakerphone and bustling around the kitchen.
Nathan met her future husband, Alan Gerson, at the Western Wall in 1970. His career as a Justice Department lawyer led them to D.C., where they raised three children and where Nathan hosted dinner parties and invited Beltway heavyweights to Shabbos on Friday nights. Alice Waters was stunned by her girlfriend's Rolodex as she talked about a series of charity events they planned together. She said, “She knew every organization. She knew all the people in Washington. She knew everyone who came there. Farmers market! ” she said with a laugh.
If Nathan started her career in the food field, she spent decades getting her sure footed, traveling far and wide collecting and developing recipes for newspapers, magazines, and cookbooks. She cataloged the Jewish culinary diaspora and often explored beyond it. One of my favorite of her recipes is Collard Vegetables in Oyster Sauce. This is something she learned from Chinese-American chefs in the Mississippi Delta. In the 1990s, she adapted “American Jewish Cooking” into a show of the same name on PBS, sponsored by Hebrew National and Lenders Bagels. One episode featured Mandy Patinkin and his mother making vegetarian “chopped liver” from peas, walnuts and egg whites. Another, “What Is Kosher?”, featured a guest appearance by her friend Julia. “She's the blueprint for that,” Jake Cohen, a 30-year-old Jewish-American cookbook author, told me. “You couldn't get Seinfeld to say the word 'Jew'. She was dragging Julia Child in the supermarket looking for kosher food!”
The sal bread challah Nathan was making was a recipe she originally developed for her book, “Children's Jewish Holiday Kitchen,'' published in 1987. She was now testing an updated version. She placed both loaves in the top of the double-walled oven and went about making lunch. She searched for cashew nuts to make tapenade with garlic and honey. This recipe was especially meaningful to her. It was served at a celebratory lunch in Israel. Her last birthday before Gerson's death was in 2019.
While we were eating, she gestured to the grass outside the window. There, she explained, they set up long tables for the annual Passover festival. She told me that her favorite part of the event is the children's play. “You see, there's God and there's Moses,” she said, speaking to the cast. (One year, she recalled, a confused customer requested the role of Jesus.) Her menu, included in a chapter of a new book called “My Holiday Is Passover,” is about her adventures. now reflects the She uses Curaçao's haroses (a fruit and nut paste essential to Seder dishes), Huevos Haminados: Serve with eggs boiled overnight in a mixture of onion peels, tea leaves, coffee grounds, and cinnamon sticks, and wilted spinach.
Last year, for a family seder, I unintentionally prepared all of Joanne Nathan's recipes. Grilled salmon with pomegranate sauce learned from an Iraqi Jewish artist. Breast meat. I especially love Nathan's matzo and his balls. It's a comforting richness she creates with fresh ginger, fresh herbs, and nutmeg. Many recipes include tricks to make them light as air (carbonated water, baking soda), but both Nathan and I prefer al dente sinkers, or slightly chewy pieces like gnocchi, rather than fluffy floaters. I prefer a certain texture. At the end of the seder, my father looked at me admiringly and happily said, BarabustaIt means “talented housewife” in Yiddish, and I never realized that I was coveting this title.
As Nathan and I finished lunch and she cut up a goat cheese wheel for dessert, I suddenly remembered. “Oh my god!” she said, jumping up from the table and rushing towards the oven. I left it out much longer than the baking time. The burnt bread crisis was averted by another crisis. It seemed like the oven wasn't producing enough heat. It might be great, we joked as we slowly roasted it. Nathan moved the bread to the bottom oven, where all the heat seemed to be stored. Within minutes, the top of each loaf had moved past its intended golden-brown hue to a deep, shiny bronze color that was on the verge of burnt. “I'm so embarrassed,” she said. And yet, when it was time for me to leave, there were two Karas there, smelling of nigella and anise. It wasn't pretty, but it was delicious. I tore it into chunks and ate it alone, sliced it to make French toast the next morning, and sprinkled it with breaded and pounded chicken thighs to make schnitzel. Of course, Nathan has the recipe. ♦
