Joan Nathan has spent her life exploring in the kitchen, trying new dishes and recipes all year. But every spring, for the Passover Seder, she sticks with a menu that follows her own family's traditions. The holiday starts tonight.
"I think Passover tells us who we are, and it tells us, this is my family sharing with other families. I get chills every year at Passover, because I realized that it started in ancient Israel. I mean, it's in the Bible!"
Nathan has written a dozen cookbooks, documenting how food traditions evolved as Jews wandered all over the world through the centuries. Now in her 80s, her new book is her most personal work yet, excavating her own culinary history in a combination memoir and cookbook called My Life in Recipes.
"I've been more nervous about this book than any book... It's sort of going into my life, you know?"
Nathan spoke with All Things Considered in her Washington, D.C. kitchen on a late March day, while she prepped a version of a dish she's been eating since childhood: chicken matzo ball soup. And, like many Jewish mothers and grandmothers before her, that afternoon, she fretted over whether the matzo balls would turn out the way she wanted them to. Every family has their own recipe, whether they're light, fluffy, hard, dense.
"So my mother's, hers were al dente," Nathan said. "And my mother-in-law's were very light. You know, she was straight from Poland."
As with every immigration story, these family recipes evolved as people relocated, fleeing wars or seeking a better life for their kids. One example is a special combination Nathan adds to her own matzo balls.
"I'd added ginger [and] nutmeg, which I knew was what my father's family would have used in Germany," she explained. "Ginger nutmeg was a very common condiment combination in the 19th and early 20th century."
For Nathan, cooking matzo ball soup for Passover, or any Jewish holiday, just feels comfortable – like home.
"It's the smell," she said. "You just know that smell. Like my mother's brisket, I know; like challah, I know. I love those smells. It knows that you're at home, that there are people that care."
While the soup simmers, Joan walks over to the living room where boxes of letters and books are laid out. They're some of the artifacts that she's uncovered from her family, including handwritten recipe books in German. One from her great-grandmother dates back to 1927, written in purple ink full of recipes for desserts like kuchen and caramel pudding. Nathan's new book is full of her letters, diary entries and parts of these family artifacts.
This book is also a love story. Joan Nathan writes about her courtship and marriage of 45 years to her late husband, Allan Gerson. He died just before the pandemic. She says writing this book felt almost like a form of therapy.
"It was my savior. I would just write. And I would include him in my life, you know? So it was a way of really making him part of my life. And I think it was really helpful to me. It really gave me strength."
My Life in Recipes also includes anecdotes from Nathan's prolific career, her world travels and stories of her collaborations with food luminaries that include Julia Child.
"Julia – I had her 90th birthday in this - she was sitting right here on this couch. I had a party for her. She's somebody who just kept living," Nathan remembered.
"And she said to me, at 90, why should I quit if I'm doing what I like to do? And she made me realize a few things: Have people that are younger around you as you get older, be positive, don't talk about being uncomfortable or whatever. And also, to write thank-you notes to everybody."
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