Nathan’s Famous Cookbook

By MARK ZANGER

Joan Nathan’s Jewish Holiday Cookbook
By Joan Nathan
532 pages. Schocken Books. $29.95.

All cookbook authors relish food, but they also relish the opportunity to revise their early publications. You learn so much once your book is out. No matter how well you tested the recipes and edited the copy, readers find errors or misleading instructions, or—best of all—variations and more information. You keep making the dishes you wrote about, and learn more about them yourself. Memories come bubbling back up. When we cook from a recipe, we are always re-enacting the work of earlier cooks, and sometimes it can feel like we are channeling their spirits.

Joan Nathan got the chance to revise on the 25^th anniversary of the publication of her wonderful The Jewish Holiday Kitchen and combined it with her book, The Jewish Holiday Baker, as well as her published articles and TV productions. The result is a thick tome full of great recipes with the added value of experience.

(Speaking of experience, I met Nathan a few times when we were both young food writers in Boston, and more recently edited her (terrific) article on Jewish cooking for the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink.)

For example, one of my favorite recipes from the Jewish Holiday Kitchen is the Zwetschgenkuchen, a Bavarian-Alsatian plum tart from Nathan’s Aunt Lisl. It’s a Rosh Hashanah recipe, since that is when plums are in season, and I used to have a plum tree. I write notes in all my cookbooks, and what I wrote on this, the first time, was “9/11/88 (1/5749) easy crunchy pie with prune plums, blueberry jelly. Good, light, sweet, crunchy crust.” I mentioned the blueberry jelly because it was a deviation from the plum jam called for in the recipe. If I were passing the recipe to someone else, I would know that the blueberry jam was just as good.

Now here’s what Nathan has changed about the recipe in 20 years. She switched from plum jam to apricot preserves. She dropped the dash of brandy from the dough. She reduced the cinnamon in the filling (Aunt Lisl “went light on the cinnamon, a spice she felt was overused in this country”). She eliminated grated lemon peel and nutmeg from the filling, and added some dried bread crumbs. She allowed unsalted butter as well as pareve margarine in the crust. She specified that the shortening be chilled (as it has to be for a food processor recipe—a reader who didn’t know this must have written to her). And she now makes this recipe “with peaches and blueberries at other times of the year.”

These changes probably accumulated over years of practice with and feedback from this recipe, but the general direction is to simplify and to stress the natural flavor of the fruit. They also move the dish away from conventional, professional cooking and make it more specific to the folk cuisine of her aunt. These are evolutions that many cooks grow into, as when Mark Miller began reducing and eliminating the garlic in many of his traditional Southwest recipes.

Folklore has always been strength for Nathan, who collected stories alongside recipes from her first book, The Flavor of Jerusalem. Her book does have most of the standard recipes—the cookie dough used for her hamantashen is the same as the one in Jewish Cookery, by Leah Leonard, a book used by three generations of my family (“3/6/93—good with whole wheat pastry flour”). The poppy-seed filling has also become simpler over 25 years, and the new instructions make it clearer that it should be refrigerated to firm up before using (“3/6/93—can be drippy”).

But what sets Nathan’s book apart from the many other Jewish holiday cookbooks is her frank use of recipes from cooks in many traditions. She is a brilliant collector, which is actually better than being a good general cook, because mix-and-match is now the style among Jewish cooks. I might be Ashkenazi, but there are usually Sephardic eggs on my Seder table, Moroccan spices in my Rosh Hashanah tzimmes, and plenty of Yemenite hot sauce on my falafel. I didn’t get all these ideas from Nathan, but her books are often the first place I look.

Plum Delicious

If Mark Zanger’s review has wet your appetite, click here to try out some of Joan Nathan’s holiday recipes, including plum tart and hamantashen.>>