Joan Nathan's memoir and cookbookCourtesy of the author and Knopf

“I’ve had a lucky life,” Joan Nathan, the preeminent food writer, author of almost a dozen cookbooks, expert on global Jewish cuisine, food activist and philanthropist, told me recently over breakfast in Santa Monica.

She is not wrong in saying that. My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories, her recently published hybrid memoir with recipes, published by Knopf, is testament to how, as Nathan put it, “one thing leads to another in life.” And I felt lucky to be having breakfast with Nathan, with whom I have so many common points of interest and contact.

Her father came to the States from Southern Germany; her mother’s family had already been in the US for a generation, having come from the diaspora of the Austro-Hungarian empire with roots in Hungary, Poland, and having spent time in Vienna (which is where my parents met).

Nathan was born in Providence, Rhode Island (I just helped with a book about a Providence notable). Already at two years old, her teachers reported that she was organizing birthday parties among the toddlers. From Providence they moved to Larchmont where her parents were among the founders of the Larchmont Temple (which I have attended) and her mother compiled a Temple Cookbook with Gertrude Blue, the mother of the late food and wine writer and impresario, Andy Blue (who was also my friend).

In her childhood there were the German dishes her father missed and the Hungarian foods she ate with her mother’s family at the long ago and much missed Hungarian restaurants of the Upper West Side of Manhattan such as Emke and Tik Tak, and Red Tulip on The East Side (all part of my calorie-laden childhood).

Recipe: Cold Sour Cherry Soup

“I learned to love exploring the world of New York’s foods from my mother’s side of the family,” Nathan writes. “While from my father’s I learned the importance of knowing my own roots and the family recipes that keep memories alive.”

Recipe: Cabbage Strudel

Her teenage years are dotted with cameo appearances by Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller whom she met in the backyard of her friend’s father’s home, the publisher George Braziller; and her summer camp friend Kathy Boudin, a founding member of The Weather Underground, who went to jail for a murder committed during the 1981 Brinks robbery for which Boudin was an accomplice.

The family moved back to Providence. Her father insisted Nathan learn French. After a summer in France and one spent with a family in Grenoble, she attended the University of Michigan graduating with a bachelor’s and master’s in French Literature (I, too, was a French literature major in college and like her did a thesis on Proust).

In 1969, Nathan decided to go to Israel. She ended up working for Teddy Kolek, Jerusalem’s legendarily charismatic mayor (who I was lucky enough to meet). In Jerusalem, she met David Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan. She did not meet Golda Meir, but she describes Golda’s matzoh Ball recipe as like her foreign policy, dense and hard. For Kollek, Nathan was tasked with leading tours of Jerusalem for visiting dignitaries and celebrities including Barbara Streisand.

Recipe: Chicken with Artichokes and Lemons

Joan NathanPhoto by Hope Leigh Courtesy of the author and Knopf

Jerusalem was significant in Nathan’s life in several ways (Jerusalem was also important to my career). It was where she was first introduced to Moroccan food, as well as Yemenite dishes. As she recalled, “Living in Jerusalem in 1970, I knew nobody who knew what falafel was.” Discovering a world of middle eastern cuisine that was terra incognita to Americans, Nathan decided to compile a cookbook, The Flavor of Jerusalem, which showcased Jewish, Muslim and Christian dishes. And Jerusalem was where, at the Wailing Wall, she met Allan Gerson, who would several years later become her husband, father to their three children, and who passed away in 2020.

“I wrote about Jerusalem as a lark.” Nathan now says. “I thought I'd be an anthropologist or something else”

When Nathan returned to America after three years in Jerusalem, she settled at first in New York, where she worked for New York’s then Mayor Abe Beame (my first job was as a speechwriter for a NYC politician). Nathan co-founded the Ninth Avenue Food festival, one of New York’s first street food festivals (San Gennaro aside) that remains a landmark event to this day (the smell of the sausages and peppers there haunt me to this day).

Recipe: Provencal Haroseth for Passover

Nathan returned to Israel in 1973 and found herself there for the Yom Kippur War where she ended up volunteering in the Golan Heights. Back in the US, she was accepted to the Kennedy School of Government in Boston, where she and Allan who had reconnected and married lived among new friends such as Julia Child. Nathan started writing about food for The Boston Globe, and published her second cookbook, The Jewish Holiday Kitchen.

In the meantime, Allan, who was an attorney, got a job in Washington DC with the Justice Department working in a newly created division, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), formed to prosecute Nazi War Criminals living in the United States (my first book was about the prosecution of Nazi extermination camp guard John Demjanjuk).

They moved to DC which, at the time, was not a foodie town. However, because of all the embassies, there were great foreign cooks from all over the world, great chefs came to DC and set up restaurants, beginning with Jean Louis Palladin who brought French cooking to DC. In DC, Joan began writing about food for the Washington Post. She also began doing lectures about food for the Smithsonian.

Recipe: Orange Cranberry Glazed Cake

Nathan’s American Folklife Cookbook followed, which took her all over the country to meet the cooks who shared recipes that had been in their families for generations. Lunch with another legend, Leo Lerman, editorial guru at Conde Nast, led to writing for Gourmet and an introduction to iconic cookbook editor Judith Jones.

By the mid-1980s, Nathan was writing for the New York Times about trips to Morrocco, South Africa, the former Soviet Union and its satellite republics, Georgia, and Lithuania. All while raising three children, and while Allen was working for Jeanne Kirkpatrick at the United Nations, and at the State Department during the Reagan administration.

Over the course of her writing, books, and food activism, Nathan met and became friends with the most notable food writers, restauranteurs, and chefs of our time such as Alice Waters, Georg Lang (whose Hungarian cookbooks and restaurants loomed large in my family), M.F. K. Fisher, Diana Kennedy, Jose Andres among many, many others. And she even became friends with Jones, who was probably the most well-known cookbook editor in the United States and also the woman who found The Diary of Anne Frank in the slush pile and championed its publication.

Recipe: Gefilte Fish

One day, as Nathan recalled, Jones called her up with an idea: To write a book about Jewish Cooking in America. “The first thing I did,” Nathan recalled, ”as there was no internet [yet]. I wrote to all the Jewish newspapers asking for information.” The recipes poured in. The book was not only a major success, and a reference point for chefs all over the world (Ottolenghi credits it as an influence), but it also provided the impetus for Nathan’s landmark Public Television program Jewish Cooking in America with Joan Nathan (now viewable on YouTube).

At that time, Jewish food had what Nathan calls, “a lousy reputation.” She elaborates: “It was overcooked. It was heavy. It was all Ashkenazi.” But food that identified as Jewish was changing. Since 1982, Wolfgang Puck has been serving his “Jewish Pizza” with crème fraiche and smoked salmon at Spago. People began to appreciate Delis and explore the diaspora of Jewish cooking even as Israeli cuisine came into its own.

The Jewish Cooking in America series gave Nathan license to highlight the diversity and strength of Jewish cooks living in the United States. “The most rewarding for me,” Nathan writes, “were those like Agi [a Holocaust survivor] from older generations telling their stories from the past that gives us all strength for the future. Once again, sharing food opened the lives and hearts of so many people.”

Recipe: Azerbaijani Eggplant Salad

Over the following three decades, Nathan was an enthusiastic globetrotter, traveling to Cuba, Vietnam, Ethiopia, working with the US State Department LIFE Project which was a food incubator business for refugees, revisiting Israel and Israeli cuisine for The Foods of Israel Today, combining her love of France and of Jewish cooking in Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, and then gathering Jewish recipes from around the world for King Solomon’s Table.

For Nathan, love of food “makes every trip a voyage of discovery for local recipes and home cooks. Food is a way to learn about other cultures, customs and religions.”

After her husband Alan died in 2020, Nathan was in deep mourning. She had read Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking and did not want to fall into the sort of repetitive thinking that deepens depression. So, she decided to work on her memoir.

“I would get up early in the morning before I could start feeling sorry for myself and just write.” Nathan then had to sort through years and years of files, clippings, boxes of letters. Fifty years of articles. “It took me almost two years to get everything in order chronologically so I could go through it.”

She wrote more than she had ever planned. In the end, with her editor, she had to cut out 30,000 words, including a story about bringing Julia Child to a potluck dinner for her children’s school at a parents’ home, where no one recognized their famous guest.

In the process of writing the book, she discovered the impact Jewish Cooking in America had, the tremendous amount of funds she raised with charity events she co-led, such as Sips and Suppers in DC, and how she had built a life one adventure at a time.

Recipe: Apple Cider Honey Cake

To be published in November 2024, Joan Nathan's book of Jewish h9oliday recipes for kids and familiesCourtesy of the author and Knopf

“I realized [that] I've always done things just because I wanted to do them, and I sort of plowed ahead,” Nathan told me. She even has a new book coming out in November, A Sweet Year, a cookbook for kids and their families for Jewish celebrations.

“I learned from everybody,” Nathan said, “and a lot of these things, you just have to know enough to see the connection. And that's what I love to do. The older I get, the more I learn…. For me, that’s one of the most exciting things.”