Joan Nathan is America’s Claudia Roden and Evelyn Rose rolled into one. The octogenarian has been writing about Jewish food over several decades. Countless Jewish cooks in the US will own one of her 12 cookbooks, which deal with not just haimish classics and festival foods but also regional recipes from all over the world and their provenance.
But in her most recent book My Life in Recipes — Food Family and Memories, published earlier this year it gets personal, with Nathan also sharing her own story. I caught up with her via a video call a few weeks ago from her home where she was between book tour dates. Between morning exercise and a series of phone interviews, she was eating a plate of scrambled eggs and asparagus.
“I had practically nothing in my house to eat — I need to go to get groceries today” she tells me between mouthfuls. Early in our chat (and from the book) it’s apparent the writing process was also a way for her to mourn husband, Allan Gerson. The lawyer and father of their four children died in November 2019, only three weeks after being diagnosed with a rare brain disease that kills just one in a million each year.
She was heartbroken. “I wanted to write something where I incorporate him into my life.” Gerson is present throughout the book, from their first meeting when both were working in Israel in the 1970’s to his omelette recipe — “it was the only food item he knew how to cook in all the years we were married” — and the trip the.
