Joan in the Baltimore Jewish Times
By Rochelle Eisenberg
Those who have ever glanced through a cookbook written by celebrated kosher cookbook author Joan Nathan — let alone prepared recipes from its pages — know that it’s not merely the food that makes it so palatable. Within the pages of her books, the writer tells stories behind what is being served.
It’s those stories, plus some delectable recipes she will share, that will be behind Nathan’s upcoming appea-rance at the Goucher College Hillel next Wednesday, Nov. 2, at 8 p.m. The program, free to the public, will kick off Goucher’s “Jewish Culture Week.” Sponsored by the college’s Judaic studies program, the Office of the President, Goucher Hillel and the Posen Foundation, the week is designed to showcase the richness of Jewish cultural life over the past 3,500 years.
Nathan — whose cookbooks incl-ude “Jewish Cooking in America” (Knopf) and “Quiches, Kugels, And Couscous: My Search For Jewish Cooking in France” (Knopf) — says she expects to demonstrate making several items, including challah, and talk about the foods of the Jews of France, as well as the journey food makes.
It is this journey, and the stories that accompany so many of her recipes, that make Nathan so fascinating. “When Joan demonstrates, she throws in asides and you are glued to the story. How many ways can you talk about challah? But she brings in bits of history to make it interesting,” says one of her closest friends, Carol Brown Goldberg, a Baltimore native who lives in Washington, D.C.
As we speak by telephone, Nathan shares some of her own stories about researching her book on French Jewish cooking. Take apples, she says. “Everyone loved Jewish apple cake,” she says. “In Maryland, even the Christians had Jewish apple cake.”
What separated Jewish apple cake apart from other apple cakes was the use of oil, not butter, she says. That made the cake parve, and thus a dessert that could be eaten with meat on Shabbat and holidays. But Jewish apple cake is not always the same in all countries of the world, as in America where it has more flour than the French version.
“Food is a bridge between ancient Israel,” Nathan says. As the Jews traveled so did the food, reinventing itself as individuals moved between countries. In ancient Israel, she says, the Sabbath stew featured lamb or goat, fava beans and chickpeas. In Eastern Europe, it evolved to include kidney beans and beef. In the United States, potatoes and barley were added.
Perhaps what really interests Nathan is that “through food, people talk about their past.” She shares one story in particular about a woman who was hidden during World War II, who did not speak about her past. One day, Nathan was making challah with her and she opened up about the local priest who wouldn’t give up the Jews.
Nathan was recently included in “The Brisket Book: A Love Story With Recipes” (Andrews McMeel Publishing). The author, Stephanie Pierson, spent a day with Nathan and writes about their conversations over brisket. Nathan also provides several different brisket recipes, adapted from her cookbooks, for the book.
Nathan calls brisket a true comfort food and points to two camps of brisket connoisseurs — those who prefer sweet versions and those who like savory ones. Nathan admits she is in the latter camp.
A fan of onions, which she sautes first to bring out their sweetness, Nathan says she likes to add a little wine, tomatoes and bay leaves to her brisket. For her, an ideal brisket meal would include a butternut squash puree and farfel or Israeli couscous to soak up the gravy.
When researching “Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous,” Nathan discovered it was impossible to find an American-style brisket in France. The French, she says, cut around the muscles of the meat and use smaller pieces instead of the large five or six-pound “hunk” of meat Americans are accustomed to.
Speaking about her upcoming visit to Baltimore, she calls Charm City a town of Jewish traditions. Nathan says she’s looking forward to people sharing with her both old recipes and the folklore surrounding food.