NEWS FEATURE: Grande Dame of the Authentic Jewish Kitchen Serves Up New Recipes for Holidays

c. 2004 Religion News Service MANCHESTER, N.H. _ When growing up, cookbook author Joan Nathan would go each year to her Aunt Lisl’s house during Hanukkah to make butter cookies decorated with blue-colored sugar. Today, Nathan, 61, has made Aunt Lisl’s prized recipe _ and hundreds of others _ available to a new generation of […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

MANCHESTER, N.H. _ When growing up, cookbook author Joan Nathan would go each year to her Aunt Lisl’s house during Hanukkah to make butter cookies decorated with blue-colored sugar.

Today, Nathan, 61, has made Aunt Lisl’s prized recipe _ and hundreds of others _ available to a new generation of Jewish cooks as they prepare holiday meals with their friends and families.


Nathan, the grande dame of the Jewish culinary world, educated Jewish epicures 25 years ago with her book “The Jewish Holiday Kitchen.” This year, just in time for Hanukkah (which begins Dec. 7), Nathan has updated her classic recipes in “Joan Nathan’s Holiday Cookbook” (Schocken Books).

It’s sure to be on many a kitchen counter as the smells of potato pancakes, jelly doughnuts and beef brisket fill the air.

The book, which offers examples of Jewish cuisine from Morocco, Argentina and Egypt in addition to Eastern Europe, is the latest offering from a culinary legend, author and television personality. But it’s also an illustration of the latest trends in Jewish food, including a proliferation of readily available kosher and traditional ingredients and a renewed desire for tradition and family gatherings around the table.

“Families aren’t together enough,” said Nathan, at lunch during a rare break between speaking engagements, “we don’t even eat together.”

“What’s so beautiful about Judaism is that at least on Friday night and on holidays, it’s a reason to have a family meal, it’s a reason to be together,” she said.

Nathan’s eight books, which brim with stories, personalities and traditional Jewish tales in addition to recipes, have established her as much as a food anthropologist as a cookbook author.

She says that in a world where “everything melds together,” Jews who are disengaged from their religion, or simply uneducated about traditional Jewish foods, recognize something in her books.


“It’s sort of a way of saying, this is my family,” she said.

Nathan, a mother of three who never attended culinary school and began her career in public policy, working for Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, said she is humbled by the many fans who describe their dog-eared copies of her books as “their Jewish cooking Bible.”

But she stresses that the importance of her work is more than simply providing good recipes. It’s about preserving time-honored techniques and foods while updating them to be palatable to today’s health-and flavor-conscious cooks.

The trick to nailing down authentic recipes, she said, is that “you have to get an immigrant who hasn’t integrated yet” to demonstrate his or her-most often her-technique.

Other Jewish food experts say that her work as a “food historian” with a modern eye is one of Nathan’s greatest contributions.

In recent decades, Jewish cuisine was in danger of becoming “bubbe cuisine, grandmother cuisine,” said Jayne Cohen, author of the 2000 publication “The Gefilte Variations: 200 Inspired Recreations of Classics from the Jewish Kitchen,” which she is currently revising for re-release.

But Nathan led the way, Cohen said, to preserving the stories and traditions of Jewish food while also introducing new variations on themes, as well as geographically diverse sources of Jewish foods.


“You need to find ways to bring new life to the cuisine, otherwise once the grandmothers die out, the cuisine is going to die out,” she said.

For Nathan, cooking “was all beautiful chemistry to me,” chemistry with ancient roots in the desert.

“Jewish food is layered food,” said Nathan, who has traveled extensively in Israel and written about Israeli cuisine. “It clearly started in ancient Israel and has wandered through time,” she said.

Nathan’s own travels have taken her into the kitchens of home cooks and professional chefs alike, where she gathered stories as well as ingredients to communicate a larger message about the big picture of Jewish life and cuisine.

“Sometimes you have to have a lot of little pictures to have a big picture,” she said.

One thing that Nathan encounters frequently in her travels is young people whose parents or grandparents have died, taking their family-famous recipes with them.


That’s where Nathan comes in.

“People are in desperate need of something today,” she said, “People who didn’t save family recipes regret it.”

In addition to their target audience, Nathan’s books have found a niche among non-Jews who are intrigued by the promise of good, time-tested food.

“Jewish culture and Jewish food are not marginalized anymore, so people don’t have that insular feeling about it,” said Cohen, who points to the popularity of klezmer music and celebrity-popular Kabbalah spirituality as evidence of the mainstreaming of Jewish culture.

Interfaith families are also drawn to Jewish foods as a way to explore the Jewish heritage of part of the family, and simply enjoy good food together.

“A lot of Jewish food just by its very nature is real comfort food,” said Cohen, meant to be prepared in advance and nourish a large crowd.

Nathan observes that food and family are a natural pair.

“You don’t have to do it all alone,” she said, “you can involve your family. Cooking or sitting at the table is time when you can talk.”


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