If Joan Nathan’s new memoir had been written to even half its 443-page length and covered far less than the 81 years of her well-lived life, it would still be one of the most engrossing and heartfelt reads of the year.

“My editor had to cut the manuscript down by 30,000 words,” said Nathan, the celebrated Jewish food writer who spoke to me by phone from her home in Washington, D.C., just before the recent release of My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories.

Our interview occurred as Nathan was preparing for a book tour, which would include conversations with such food luminaries as Jake Cohen, Pati Jinich and Ruth Reichl, the former editor in chief of Gourmet Magazine.

“Joan is fearless and has more energy than anyone I’ve ever met, and more curiosity,” Reichl said. “That’s what makes her such a great writer. She loves people and will keep asking questions until they’ve told her all their secrets.”

Those traits have served her well in a Zelig-like career that has spanned 50-plus years, research trips to multiple continents, two television series, 12 cookbooks and countless accolades, including three prestigious James Beard Awards.

She also broke ground as the first superstar Jewish food writer, helping to popularize a style of Jewish food writing that incorporates travel and cultural exploration. In the process, she has served as a role model and mentor for those who have followed, including myself. I first wrote about Nathan for Hadassah Magazine in 2010, and we have developed a friendship over the past 15 years.

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MAGAZINE DISCUSSION EVENT: Join us on Thursday, June 20 at 7:00 PM ET when Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein interviews Joan Nathan, the grande dame of Jewish cooking in America and author of the new memoir, My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories. Nathan’s more than 50-year career has spanned research trips to multiple continents, two television series, 12 cookbooks and countless accolades, including three prestigious James Beard Awards.

This event is free and open to all. Zoom captioning will be provided.

Register Now

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“Whether they know it or not, today’s generation of Jewish food writers owes a significant part of their careers to Joan’s pioneering research and writing,” said Leah Koenig, a cookbook author whose most recent work is Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen. “More than once in my career someone has said to me, ‘You’re the new Joan Nathan!’ I definitely take it as a compliment, but I also reject the premise. She is a singular force.”

Born to Ernest, a German Jew who sailed to the United States via first-class cabin in 1929 with valuable chemical patents in hand, and Pearl, a Barnard College graduate who loved a stiff cocktail until her death at age 103, Nathan spent a charmed childhood in Larchmont, N.Y., and Providence, R.I. Her culturally Jewish but not religious family belonged to a Reform congregation in Rhode Island and celebrated Jewish holidays with seders that included classic family recipes like leg of lamb with mint jelly as well as unconventional flourishes like cocktails before the seder.

“A startling aberration, I learned later, from Jewish tradition,” Nathan writes in her new book.

The memoir is filled with thousands of laser-sharp details and anecdotes thanks to a treasure trove of correspondence, photos and ephemera Nathan spent years reviewing—not to mention a copy of virtually every article she ever wrote (including hundreds for The New York Times, where she has been contributing since the late 1970s, and several for Hadassah Magazine).

After attending the University of Michigan—including a junior year in Paris that would jumpstart a lifetime of Francophilia that culminated in her book Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, published in 2010—Nathan worked in New York City for a few years before developing a serious case of wanderlust. That resulted in her first visit to Israel in 1969. Six months later, she returned to Israel and took a job as a press attaché for the legendary Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek.

Living in the newly reunified Jerusalem, she explored the local cuisine, delving into then-exotic dishes like falafel and hummus and spices like cumin and coriander. She channeled that inspiration into her first cookbook, The Flavor of Jerusalem, written with Judy Goldman and published in 1975, after Nathan’s return to the United States. The book features people and recipes from a large cross-section of Jerusalem life—Jewish and Arab, observant and secular. Little, Brown, the publisher, made the mistake of featuring the non-kosher book’s recipe for shrimp sukiyaki in a brochure advertising Nathan’s availability to speak to Hadassah chapters.

“Not great publicity,” Nathan writes in My Life in Recipes about the mishap.

It was during her two years in Israel that she met Allan Gerson, a young attorney who was the son of Holocaust survivors. After returning to New York, the two married in 1974, Joan in a dress sewn by Gerson’s dressmaker mother. Gerson would become known for his successful suit against the Libyan government for the 1987 Lockerbie terror attack, where 259 people were killed onboard Pan Am Flight 103. He helped win a $2.7 billion settlement for victim families. 

“Allan was a traditionalist in some ways, but he was always proud of me and encouraged me to pursue my career and do what I want,” Nathan said of her husband, who passed away in 2019. “What more could you ask for?”

In 1979, while living in Boston and studying public policy and government at the Harvard Kennedy School while Gerson taught law nearby, Nathan sold the idea for The Jewish Holiday Kitchen to Schocken Books. Her time in Israel had opened her eyes to Jewish food beyond Ashkenazi traditions, and her inclusion of dishes like Moroccan baked fish and lamb tagine helped widen the road for Jewish foodways and expose home cooks to people and stories they may otherwise not have encountered. “I always say that you don’t have to live in Israel, but Israel teaches you how to live,” Nathan told me.

That is true “especially now,” she said. “Even back in my early years living in Israel, I remember soldiers going off to fight and being killed or injured. Now it is happening again.”

As her career and reputation continued to grow, so did her bibliography, cementing her status as the grande dame of Jewish cooking. More instant-classic titles followed, notably Jewish Cooking in America in 1984 and The Foods of Israel Today in 2001.   

Over email, Nathan recalled traveling to Sri Lanka to research the cinnamon harvest for King Solomon’s Table, which came out in 2017.

“I was so intent about learning about cinnamon after…having read about Maimonides’ brother David, who was lost at sea off the coast of Sri Lanka trafficking cinnamon, that I wanted to see how it was harvested and what people ate with cinnamon,” said Nathan, who was hosted in the home of a cinnamon farmer whose cooks served cinnamon-infused rice. “I chanced on the most delicious cinnamon bread—that reminded me of cinnamon babka—at a roadside stand when we were driving in the countryside…. Our driver got the recipe for me, and someone from the Sri Lanka Embassy in Washington helped me make the bread, which ended up in the book.”

“The ultimate satisfaction of my work,” Nathan said, “has been to find a recipe—a good recipe—and through that recipe to recognize an otherwise unrecognized human being and to share it with my readers.”

Nathan says her greatest joy has been her children. Today, her daughter Daniela and son David live in Los Angeles with their spouses. (Daniela and her wife, Talia, are parents to Nathan’s grandchildren, 6-year-old twins Alma and Aviv.) Her daughter Merissa is a rabbinical student in Philadelphia.

It was during the Covid-19 pandemic, soon after Gerson died of a degenerative brain disease, that Nathan went to quarantine with Merissa, who was then living in New Orleans. On endless walks, thinking about her life and going through source material, often falling asleep with documents on her pillow, My Life in Recipes began to take shape.

These days, Nathan’s curiosity endures. Her next project, a children’s cookbook called A Sweet Year, which her grandchildren helped her with, is slated to come out at the end of the year. 

“After that, I’m not sure I am going to write any more books,” Nathan told me. “These days, I’m more interested in reading a book than making one.”

More than ever, Nathan relishes her summers on Martha’s Vineyard, with her daily swims, long walks and the relaxed cooking and entertaining she does there for friends and family. “That’s my happy place,” Nathan said. “I can’t wait for summer.”

Until then, her springtime pesto pasta and Persian cucumber salad should be top contenders for your dairy Shavuot menu. 

PERSIAN CUCUMBER SALAD WITH YOGURT AND WALNUTS

Ingredients
2 small Persian cucumbers
1 small onion, or the white parts of 2 scallions (about 1⁄4 cup diced)
2 radishes
1⁄3 cup currants or dried cranberries
1⁄3 cup dried apricots, diced
1⁄3 cup walnuts, roughly chopped
6 sprigs fresh mint, chopped
4 tablespoons fresh dill, chopped
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
About 1 cup plain yogurt
2 tablespoons fresh cilantro, chopped (optional)

Instructions
1. Dice the cucumbers, the onion and the radishes and put them into a ceramic bowl. Add the currants, apricots and walnuts with half the mint and half the dill, and salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Spoon the yogurt on top just to cover, and stir it in. Cover, and let the salad sit in the refrigerator for a few hours or overnight.

2. Just before serving, sprinkle the salad with the remaining mint and dill and, if you want, cilantro. Serve it chilled.

PASTA WITH ALMOND PESTO, GREEN BEANS, EGGPLANT, AND CHERRY TOMATOES

Ingredients
1/2 teaspoons kosher salt, plus 2 tablespoons for the pasta pot
1 pound Japanese eggplant, sliced into 1⁄2-inch rounds
4 cloves garlic
Leaves and tender stems from 1 bunch fresh basil (about 2 cups)
1 cup blanched almonds
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more if needed
1⁄2 cup grated Pecorino, Romano or Parmesan cheese
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
12 ounces busiate, or other pasta of your choice
8 ounces string beans, broccoli and/or zucchini, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cup fresh cherry tomatoes, halved

Instructions
1. Sprinkle about 1⁄2 teaspoon of the salt over the eggplant slices and let them sit in a single layer on a paper towel for about an hour.

2. To make the pesto, put the garlic, all but a few leaves of basil, all but 2 tablespoons of the almonds and 1 teaspoon of salt in a mortar or food processor. Slowly add 3⁄4 cup of the olive oil and all but a tablespoon of the cheese. Pulse just a few times in the food processor, or work the mortar with a pestle, to grind until the sauce is rich and crunchy yet spreadable and the nuts are grainy in texture and still slightly crunchy; add a little more oil if desired. Adjust seasonings to taste.

3. Blot the eggplant dry. Put the remaining 1⁄4 cup of the olive oil into a frying pan and warm it over medium-high heat. Add the eggplant rounds and cook until they’re golden on both sides. Drain them on paper towels and sprinkle them with pepper to taste. Fry the remaining almonds until they’re golden, then drain them.

4. Bring a large pot of water to a boil, add the pasta with 2 tablespoons of salt, stir and cook until al dente, stirring occasionally. When the pasta has been cooking for a minute or so, add the snipped beans, broccoli and/or zucchini and cook until done, or steam the vegetables in a colander over the pasta and cook until they are both al dente.

5. Strain the vegetables and pasta and transfer them to a bowl. Gently stir the pesto into the pasta and vegetables until everything is thoroughly combined. Sprinkle with the remaining tablespoon grated cheese, the remaining basil leaves and the fried almonds.
Decorate with the eggplant rounds and halved cherry tomatoes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

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Adeena Sussman is the author of Shabbat: Recipes and Rituals from My Kitchen to Yours and Sababa: Fresh, Sunny Flavors from My Israeli Kitchen. She lives in Tel Aviv.