Hello from the other side of the Passover seders,
Our family’s Passover preparations were belated but joyful. We blasted Shira Kline and Green Day while we cleaned. The kids wiped down the fridge and vacuumed a year’s worth of crumbs from under the couch cushions, while Yoshie and I packed away the pretzels and graham crackers from the pantry. Then we drove down to Philly for the seders with Yoshie’s family.
The immense pain from the world outside made its way inside the shelter of our seder table. How could it not? But I was grateful for a few days of rest and connection.
All of that is preamble to say:
I hope your Passover celebrations were meaningful, delicious, and safe.
I apologize that this week’s newsletter is coming to you so late in the week.
I’m thrilled to share this week’s recipe and interview with none other than my personal hero, Joan Nathan.
I don’t typically publish two interviews in a row, but this spring has been an especially robust and exciting cookbook season. And since Joan’s new book, My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories, is every bit as wonderful as I’d hoped it would be—and I want as many people as possible to know about it—this week’s newsletter is also going out to my entire newsletter community. (Thank you to everyone who upgraded to a paid subscription this past week. I’m so grateful to have you!)
I have known *about* Joan for what feels like forever. Early in my own career, I turned to her cookbooks regularly, marveling at how they opened up a world of Jewish recipes and stories that I never learned about growing up. In 2010, I got to know Joan personally when I travelled with her and a delegation of food writers to tour the emergent food scenes in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and northern Israel.
Watching Joan “in action” as a journalist and recipe collector was a marvel. She was insatiably curious and utterly fearless when it came to following a lead. While in the Old City, I remember she steered the group off the scheduled itinerary to chat with a man who was making some especially delicious-looking chickpea dish. Within minutes they were bantering like old friends and he was dipping a spoon into a large aluminum pot to share a taste. I can’t remember if she walked away with the recipe, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Suffice it to say, Joan Nathan is canon. She did for Jewish cuisine what Julia Child did for French cuisine, Madhur Jaffrey did for Indian cuisine, Edna Lewis did for the cuisine of the American South, and Lidia Bastianich did for Italian cuisine. (Not surprisingly they all shared the same editor, the legendary Judith Jones about whom there is another wonderful book out this spring.) Over the years of my career, many people have told me, “You are the next Joan Nathan.” And I invariably respond, “Thank you, but there can only ever be one Joan.”
My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories
My Life in Recipes, which was published earlier this month, weaves together a patchwork of memories and vignettes that shares a glimpse into Joan’s remarkable life. It also illuminates the universalities—the push/pull of tradition vs. assimilation, the sacrifices made to create a good life for one’s children—of the Jewish American immigrant experience in the early 20th century
Joan recalls her Polish grandmother’s hat shop, which moved from the Lower East Side to fashionable Madison Avenue. She reminisces about listening to her father recite German nursery rhymes, and about Thanksgiving dinners with double crusted apple pies (made with Crisco), Sunday night meals at the local Cantonese restaurant, and special weekend visits to the Jewish deli. She writes about being restricted, along with all Jewish families, from joining the local country club and dating a handsome Italian football player in high school. “He asked me to wear his cleat around my neck, a matter of great significance,” she writes.
I loved reading about Joan’s travels to France, Italy, Israel, Cuba, Kenya, Morocco, and Vietnam, among countless other places, and her romance with her husband of 42 years, Allan Gerson who passed away in late 2019. And I deeply resonated with the chapters where she first steps into the world of food writing in the 1970s—a field that barely existed at the time.
She describes her first monthly food column at The Boston Globe’s magazine as a “baptism by fire.” One of her earliest published recipes, for Scottish shortbread, contained a typo that led to “disastrous” results and a letter from a reader that read, “It tasted good but it was more like a thin piece of peanut brittle.” “Words no food writer wants to hear,” Joan writes. (Long time readers of this newsletter know that when it comes to unfortunate recipe typos, I have been there.)
Before it came out, I’d hoped that My Life in Recipes would dish a bit about the community of iconic chefs and food writers that Joan has worked with over the years. The book delivered with essays about her and Allan’s lunch with M.F.K Fisher (“although ill with Parkinson’s, she still loved a good-looking man…[and] Allan charmed Mary Frances”), visiting with Diana Kennedy in Mexico, and the party she threw for Julia Child in honor of her donating her Cambridge kitchen to the National Museum of American History. “My son David and I spent the entire summer planning what we could possibly make for Julia,” Joan writes. The menu: stuffed zucchini blossoms, salmon with za’atar and preserved lemon, fresh corn with pesto butter, and an apricot-meringue kuchen.
But while I delighted in each section of My Life in Recipes, nothing in the book touched me as profoundly as these lines from the chapter called Motherhood and Raising Children:
“When I look back, I don’t know how I did it; one, then two, then three children, with a husband working in New York at the United States delegation to the United Nations in those early years. Even with some help, it was hard, juggling everything. I was lucky: I worked from home before it became popular and could work when I wanted. But that did not prevent me from feeling guilty. Mothers have never had it easy, whether they work from home or in the office—or even if their job is “only” to take care of their children. Striking a balance is never simple or guilt-free.
I felt this whole paragraph in my kishkes. And it brought me great comfort, as someone in the thick of things with two young kids, a food writing career, and plenty of guilt over my split attentions, to hear that one of my idols had felt the same. I am currently finishing this newsletter after tucking both my kids into their beds. A pile of unwashed dinner dishes, and another of unfolded laundry, await. So it is even more significant to see Joan firmly on the other side of that challenging hill, with loving adult children and a fulfilling career she never sacrificed.
At the end of each chapter there are, naturally, recipes—each an edible snapshot of Joan’s life. You will find Jewish holiday classics like her mother Pearl’s plum cake and hamantaschen. There are also several tempting chicken dishes, including a rustic roasted chicken with peaches she first tasted in France, and mousakhan, a Palestinian chicken dish with sumac, pine nuts, and onions that she learned from Jordan’s minister of culture.
Joan graciously shared one of the book’s recipes for this week’s newsletter: Persian Cucumber Salad with Yogurt and Walnuts. The salad’s contrasting textures and flavors—crunchy vegetables and creamy yogurt, buttery walnuts and sweet-tart dried fruit—remind me a bit of a Waldorf salad. It also recalls the bowls of chilled sour cream and chopped vegetables enjoyed in the summer months by Ashkenazi Jews. As Joan writes, “Similar tasteful, refreshing, and simple salads come from many cultures, but I think this is one of the best I have ever tasted.”
The salad is completely Passover friendly, and an excellent choice if you are looking for dishes to get you happily through the holiday. But bookmark this newsletter because it is the kind of salad you will make all summer long.
Below the recipe, you can find my interview with Joan. And you can read more about (and purchase) My Life in Recipes here. Just like Joan herself, the book is a treasure.
Persian Cucumber Salad with Yogurt and Walnuts
This recipe is reprinted, with permission, from My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories, by Joan Nathan (Knopf, April, 2024).
Serves 4 to 6 (though it can easily be doubled and arguably should be—you will eat it fast!)
2 small Persian cucumbers
1 small onion, or the white parts of 2 scallions (about 1/4 cup diced)
2 radishes (I used 4 because I particularly like them)
1/3 cup (48 g) currants or dried cranberries
1/3 cup (63 g) dried apricots, diced
1/3 cup (43 g) walnuts, roughly chopped
6 sprigs fresh mint, chopped
4 tablespoons chopped fresh dill (I used 2 teaspoons dried dill, because that’s what I had.)
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
About 1 cup (240 g) plain yogurt (I only needed 1/2 cup / 120 g)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro, optional
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.
Just before serving, sprinkle the salad with the remaining mint and dill and, if you want, cilantro. Serve it chilled.
Joan Nathan on My Life in Recipes
After 11 genre-defining cookbooks about Jewish cuisine, what was your inspiration for writing a memoir now?
Over the years I saved all of my correspondence—letters from my parents when I was traveling, the diaries I wrote when I lived in France, boxes full of clippings, photos of my family and children, the menu from my grandparents’ wedding, a letter denying my ancestors entry into the United States, letters from Julia Child, Judith Jones, and Maida Heatter. I really saved everything. After my husband Allan passed away, I started to go through everything I had and realized I’ve lived a pretty interesting life. In one of the letters it said I took Barbara Streisand on a tour around Jerusalem. I had absolutely no recollection of that! But I’m sure I did because I told because my parents about it.
After so many cookbooks, I wasn’t sure if I had anything left to share. But I talked with my publisher and we decided a memoir was a worthy project. The manuscript took 3-4 years, with a delay from the pandemic. But after Allan died, it was a wonderful way of integrating him back into my life.
Could you share a favorite anecdote from the book?
When I was a teenager in Larchmont a friend of mine said to a group of us, “If you come to my house at 5pm, you can meet Marilyn Monroe. She and Arthur Miller were visiting my friend’s parents—this was in 1955 or 1956. We all came, of course, and were so excited to meet her. She was the most famous person in the world, and she was exactly like she was in the movies. It doesn’t actually have to do with food at all, but I told my editors they couldn’t take that anecdote out of the book!
I have long admired your reporting style, and particularly your willingness to go outside the box to find the story. Can you tell me more about how you learned to “follow your nose?”
I still do that to this day! You meet incredible people and learn good home cooking recipes that way. I remember doing that when I was traveling with my son in Morocco. We were in this small town in the northern part of the country having lunch. I smelled this incredible aroma of couscous and so we followed it to the door it was coming from and knocked and were invited in to taste it. We were there for a long while and suddenly realized we were supposed to be at a meeting at the mayor’s house! So we thanked our new friends and left.
What are your thoughts about the current state of food media?
When I first started, I wrote by hand, and I wrote my first cookbook with a typewriter in 1975. And now everything is on computers. One big difference is that everything is shorter! Looking over my more recent articles, I realized how much shorter they are than they used to be. And there’s a lot of misinformation out there and not a lot of depth to some of the writing. As you get older you are much more aware of time, but I’m glued to my cell phone just like everyone else! So yes, everything changes but the importance of carrying on traditions stays the same.