Joan Nathan tracks American culture and food writing in the 1970s

There are food memoirs written by people in their 30s and 40s. Then there is My Life in Recipes by Joan Nathan. Starting in the 1970s, she has spent a lifetime exploring, learning, writing, and teaching about Jewish food all over the globe. She changed the way Jewish food was seen in America. In many households, her books are as fundamental as Julia Child's were for a certain generation of cooks. This is a weighty memoir from a woman who has lived — and continues to live — a big life. 

Joan Nathan: That's a great introduction.

Evan Kleiman: Well, it's so true. Reading this book is just astounding. Your early adulthood was amazing and riveting, and the opportunities you had that you flung yourselves at, where I, during the same period of time, was hiding myself. It was just so impressive. In a way, you're kind of like a Zelig. You've met so many brilliant, famous people. Were you at all apprehensive about mining yourself for stories? 

No, I guess I wasn't. I don't think I… you know, people keep asking me that it just happened. I mean, you know, I fell into Teddy Kollek.

Mahammar is a Syrian dip that incorporates peppers, pomegranate seeds, and walnuts. Photo by Gabriela Herman.

Let's talk about Teddy Kollek for a minute. He was the mayor of Jerusalem. This was in the '70s, and you ended up, at a very young age, becoming his foreign press attache, right? This must have been just an unbelievable education in how to be at ease with anyone and to bring people together socially.

That's really how I learned. What I learned, Teddy was brilliant at breaking the ice with people. Don't forget, this was in 1970. The '67 war was three years before. He was in a city that was trying to come together, and he had many, many, not just Arab populations, but religious populations that he didn't agree with, and he had to be a mayor for them. So many times, it was laughter that pulled them together, or a meal.

You left that job and in a roundabout way, it led to a job working for the New York City's Mayor Office. It was during that period of time that you co-founded the Ninth Avenue International Food Festival, which is still going. Tell us about that moment In time and what forces came together to make you and the other people involved in founding it, think it would be a good idea.

It hadn't been published yet but I had put together a cookbook called The Flavor of Jerusalem, which was about all the people in Jerusalem — Jews, Christians, and Muslims. So I came to this job, and part of it was trying to look at the porn places on 42nd street in New York, but the other was the Ninth Avenue Merchant Association, which, at the time, was being ravaged by real estate people that wanted to build big buildings, and they really didn't want to destroy all the ma and pa run places in small brownstones. I noticed that there were all these ma and pa stores like, that's when one that's still existing. It was a Greek store that made their own phyllo dough, and they still make it. 

Having written a cookbook, I guess I had this idea: Why don't we get a lot of cookbook writers to come in front of these stores, like Alps Drug Store, or Poseidon, the Greek store, and demonstrate recipes? And for some reason, everybody loved the idea. We first established a group of merchants and food writers, people like James Beard and Craig Claiborne from the New York Times. We were really babes doing this, honestly, Evan.

There were two other people, but one person in particular, named John Phillips, and he was a big foodie, a foodie before they were foodies. We just had this idea and we did it. We had no budget whatsoever and we were afraid nobody would show up. The day before, we were really scared. The day of the first festival, which was 50 years ago, there were 150,000 people. It was unbelievable.

Joan Nathan has been dubbed the "matriarch of Jewish cooking." Photo by Hope Leigh.

What was your next move in terms of writing about food and how did you learn to be a food writer? Did you have mentors who taught you the craft?

Frst of all, as soon as I got out of college, I was looking at the New York Times and reading Craig Claiborne and trying his recipes. We would do that. We couldn't afford to go to restaurants, unless you know my grandfather, somebody was taking me. Alan, my late husband, and I got married. He went to Cambridge, and I went with him too. I was able to get into the Kennedy School to spend a year in a mid-career program because I'd been working for two mayors. 

I studied for a year, and at the time, I realized that I really wanted to write not about food, because you didn't write articles about ethnicity and food, you would write just food articles in those days. So I went to the Boston Globe, I knew that somebody must have given me an entree to, and I have no idea how I got it, to Tony Spinazola, the then editor who was the restaurant critic as well. He was like the Ruth Reichl or Jonathan Gold of Boston. He said, "Well, I don't think you should write about ethnicity. I think you should write about ethnicity and food." So he had me write once a month, which was just fine with me, in the magazine, and I loved it. One thing led to the other but I really didn't… honestly, it was baptism by fire, and I made a lot of mistakes. 

Well, yeah. I mean, we all do at the beginning, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

One of the things that really struck me about your book was that yours has been a life, this may sound incredibly obvious, but lived in person. I mean, not in virtual reality, and so much of your learning took place that way. You just described hitting the pavement, trying to find the original person, to find something. In a bid to remind listeners of the value of the in-person experience, can you share how you learned a lot about Eastern European food folklore from Dov Noy?

That was amazing. It's funny because I just took all of this as my life until I started writing this book, and I realized how lucky I was that I fell into certain things. Because it was a mid-career program about political science, I thought, I really want to do sociology of food. I met him, and he was a folklorist in Israel, and knew everything about Eastern European and a lot of Sephardic folklore as well Jewish folklore. He just came up to me and he said, "You know, I'm never going to write a book, but if you write a book, I'll tell you everything I know." So that's how we did it.

"My Life in Recipes" is studded with Joan Nathan's encounters with James Beard, Craig Claiborne, and Teddy Kollek, the former mayor of Jerusalem. Photo courtesy of Knopf.

So you set up a weekly meeting where you would meet in person and have a conversation?

Right, exactly, about food. And he'd show me, for example, you eat carrots at Rosh Hashanah. And he explained to me that the word carrots means "more," that something should be more. Or I'll tell you another one that I always think about him when I do it. There's something called a stuffed matzo ball, and it's a Hasidic version of matzo ball that's stuffed with meat and with a little bit of cinnamon. This is something that's eaten in Lithuania and other places. I think it came from Vilnius. The sweetness of the meat inside the matzo ball is supposed to remind you of the sweetness of the Sabbath. I would never have known something like that, but he taught me that. 

Then, I found when I was writing Jewish cooking in America, I interviewed some people from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a friend of my parents, and they had stuffed matzo balls with meat and they used to make them as if they were a cupcake, in muffin tins. And I realized how they did that, because they were in Mississippi, but that's not what they had in Lithuania. I realized how recipes travel in different ways, and I've been doing that my whole life, you know, learning that. It's sort of, it's just the way I look at food now.