Jewish cooking 'godmother' recreates vivid family memories and 'sense of belonging' through food

Often referred to as "the godmother of Jewish cooking," award-winning author and food writer Joan Nathan recently released her 12th cookbook, "My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories" (Knopf). 

She brings her family’s history to life by recreating the recipes of her ancestors, she told Fox News Digital in an interview. She's also been inspired to create other dishes through her travels.

Each dish that Nathan prepares is tied to a memory or an adventure, she said. 

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For instance, she includes a recipe for Albert Einstein’s favorite dessert, strawberries mixed with whipped cream. 

Why? Because Nathan's father and Einstein met on a sleeper train from New York to Atlanta — and Nathan has the letter correspondences from 1947 to prove it. 

Her book also shares her friendships with dignitaries, journalists and famous chefs, such as Julia Child — whom she told Fox News Digital was hardworking, fun and "somebody who you could learn a lot about life from."

‘Footsteps of my family's history'

Nathan traveled to Israel, Germany, Slovakia and Poland to "find the footsteps of my family’s history," she writes in the book.

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Born in 1943 in Providence, Rhode Island, Nathan spent her childhood both in Providence and Larchmont, New York, but the eclectic foods that her European grandparents shared with her made an indelible imprint, she said.

"That one dish reminds us of being safe as a child within our homes." 

"Their food preferences became the folklore of my life, as did the stories that accompanied the food they served," Nathan writes in "My Life in Recipes."

She said that "most of us have a dish that stays with us throughout our life. The thought, taste, and smell of that one dish reminds us of being safe as a child within our homes." 

That dish for her? It's the matzo ball soup her mother used to make with dill, pieces of white chicken and carrot rounds. 

Nathan remembers her brother in his 50s watching their mother cook the matzo balls with his wife, who wanted to learn how to prepare the dish for their family. 

"This dumpling dish provides a sense of well-being and belonging for us all," Nathan says in the book.

She described learning how Jewish women started making matzo balls from leftover bread and crushed matzo. After reading pre-World War II German Jewish cookbooks, she enhanced the flavor with ground nutmeg, ginger and cilantro. 

The book also includes a recipe for what she calls "Vegan Matzo Balls with Vegetable Broth" — substituting chickpea water for eggs.

Ancestral roots in Germany

A self-professed "genealogy junkie," Nathan traced her ancestral roots back to 1754, to the town of Laupheim, Germany, where her relatives lived until Jews were permitted to move to larger cities such as Augsburg, Germany, where Nathan’s grandmother and grandfather met.

In 2021, Nathan took a trip to Laupheim, tasting berches, a popular bread that stemmed from a recipe for eggless challah. 

The recipe was handed down by a Jewish baker before World War I, she notes in her book.

Nathan said that in the summer, she adds rosemary and basil from her garden to the recipe, then fennel and anise seeds in the cooler months.

She imagined her female ancestors waiting in anticipation for the bread to rise on Thursday night. 

Nathan details in her book that it is a "mitzvah" (good deed) for Jewish women to bake challah before Shabbat. It's "symbolic of the manna distributed in the desert," and unites family and friends.

"We all join in, holding the challah or touching someone holding it, to make an unbroken chain connecting us to the food that comes from the earth."

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When Nathan went to Laupheim, she imagined her female ancestors waiting in anticipation for the bread to rise on Thursday night, she writes. "On Friday morning they would knead and braid the bread, sprinkle the top with poppy seeds, mark it with a wooden stamp, and carry it to a communal oven."

Her father’s sisters, Trudel Bloch and Lisl Regensteiner, who grew up in Augsburg, Germany, learned how to cook in their mother’s miniature Nuremberg doll kitchen that came equipped with a functioning stove. 

Nathan’s aunts threw parties and "dressed up in uniforms with white aprons and bonnets; they baked miniature fruit and nut kuchen and torten in the copper molds … They used the tiny cups and saucers for tea and coffee."

She played with that miniature kitchen when she was about six years old, she said. 

Her father and his family escaped from Nazi Germany in 1929, right after the stock market crash. 

Her aunts gave her six family cookbooks — and she learned how to cook from aunt Lisl Regensteiner, in addition to taking home economics classes in seventh grade. 

Nathan said her mother cooked more as she got older, making "beautiful rugelach," cookies, coleslaw, and her signature matzo ball soup.

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Nathan’s mother was born in New York City; her father and his family escaped from Nazi Germany in 1929, right after the stock market crash, Nathan told Fox News Digital.

"My Life in Recipes" details how Nathan’s father fervently wrote letters to the American government, advocating for his relatives to immigrate from Nazi Germany. He successfully brought his parents, sisters, their families and many others, over to the U.S. — but about 28 of his other relatives perished in death camps.

Culinary adventures of a lifetime

Through her travels, Nathan had her own culinary adventures that inspired new recipes, such as "Mango Poached in Vanilla Syrup."

While staying at a house on a rice field in Madagascar, East Africa, Nathan noticed a glass jar of ripe mangoes in sugar water with a scraped vanilla pod that had been sitting in the sun for several days. 

"The sun’s warmth infused the vanilla into the syrup, perfuming the mangoes," she writes in the book. 

Nathan said that when she makes this recipe at home, she heats it up on the stove and pairs it with fresh mint or vanilla ice cream.

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In the summer of 1969, when Nathan was 26, she decided to travel to Israel after sitting next to a Peace Corps volunteer who told her that Israel was "the most fascinating place he had ever visited." Her trip turned into a two-and-a-half year sojourn.

She fell in love with eggplant kugels, soufflés, and roasted and fried eggplant. 

The book notes how Nathan discovered Kurdish soups from biblical times, and ate slowly cooked stuffed vegetables and dumplings at a tiny Jerusalem restaurant where the menu had not changed in 50 years. 

In addition to enjoying falafel, humus and Moroccan grape leaves, she fell in love with eggplant kugels, soufflés, and roasted and fried eggplant. 

"I began to think of Jerusalem as the epicenter of eggplant preparation."

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While in Israel, Nathan met her husband, Allan Gerson, an international attorney who specialized in anti-terrorism; they did not start dating until three years later. 

She described him to Fox News Digital as funny and "a larger-than-life character."

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Nathan wrote her first cookbook with her friend, Judy Stacey Goldman, titled, "The Flavor of Jerusalem," published in 1975.

In 2019, Nathan and her husband returned to Israel to celebrate his 74th birthday with their three children and their families, including two grandchildren. They ate at restaurants in Ma’alot-Tarshiha, a Jewish-Arab community, swam in the Mediterranean Sea and watched movies together. 

The night of Gerson’s birthday, they hired a chef and gathered with friends and family at a long table at a holiday villa in the Galilee for dinner. 

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"My favorite appetizer from Allan’s birthday party was the cashew tapenade with garlic, honey, thyme, and olive oil," said Nathan. "This dip will always remind me of Allan and our last family trip together."

Gerson passed away soon afterward from spontaneous Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an illness Nathan said "was like having Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s on steroids."

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Today, she finds solace through preparing the foods her husband enjoyed. She always made strawberry rhubarb pie for his birthday, she said, because he loved it so much.

"Each year, I make sure to prepare lots of rhubarb desserts in memory of my Allan."