On a recent Thursday afternoon, Joan Nathan sat perched on a stool at Lehrhaus, her first visit to the innovative Jewish tavern and learning space that has attracted fans from in and out of Boston’s Jewish community.
Nathan, a master of global Jewish cuisine, was dishing with co-founders Charlie Schwartz and Josh Foer, their consulting chef Michael Leviton and the staff before the doors opened for the evening.
The author of a dozen cookbooks and a two-time winner of the James Beard Foundation Award, Nathan was in Boston on a whirlwind book tour for “My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories,” her recently published, widely acclaimed memoir.
Later that day, she spoke to a fan-filled crowd for a Harvard Book Store program at the Brattle Theatre with Jewish Women’s Archive, in a lively conversation with Judith Rosenbaum, the organization’s CEO.
In her memoir, filled with tantalizing recipes and photographs, Nathan brings her culinary journeys to life through her masterful and engaging storytelling.
The narrative describes growing up in Providence and highlights the pivotal years she spent in Cambridge, where she and her husband, Allan Gerson, a prominent human rights attorney, settled after they were married. Gerson died at the end of 2019 at age 74.
At Lehrhaus, the informal back-and-forth conversation traversed a wide array of Jewish-foodie subjects, from how etrogs, the special lemon-like fruit that is part of religious services during Sukkot, smell differently from other citrus, to a deep dive of what makes food Jewish.
Nathan underscored the important role Jewish dietary laws play in sustaining Jewish continuity. Another distinction, she mused, is the weekly observance of Shabbat with special meals and foods that Jews have adapted with the ingredients and flavors of the diasporic locales where they have settled over thousands of years.
The “people of the book” also wrote about their food.
“They [recipes] were written down very early,” said Nathan. “Because the Sabbath was so important to us, we get all these comments about foods in the Mishnah and the Talmud,” adding that even Rashi, the great French Jewish medieval commentator, wrote about food.
Nathan was impressed with the “chopped not liver” (made with eggplant) she sampled at Lehrhaus, she told the Brattle audience less than two hours later. It came close to regular chopped liver.
In a phone conversation with JewishBoston, Nathan shed light on how the years she spent in Cambridge in the mid-to-late 1970s proved formative.
She had just published “The Flavor of Jerusalem,” her first cookbook, co-authored with Judy Stacey Goldman, based on living in Jerusalem. In 1976, after completing a fellowship at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Nathan was invited to write a regular column for The Boston Globe about the area’s ethnic foods.
In one of her earliest, before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Nathan wrote “Sweet Bread for the Sabbath,” about the extraordinary challah-baking prowess of Ada Baum Lipsitz, an 81-year-old grandmother whose Jewish family had immigrated to Boston from Russia in the closing years of the 19th century, when Lipsitz was still a toddler.
Nearly 50 years later, Nathan continues to honor Lipsitz, who became a friend, in her own challah baking inspired by Lipsitz’s recipe that Nathan adapts with seasonal herbs from her garden.
Other Boston touch points that hold deep meaning for Nathan include The Window Shop and Alice Broch, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, who baked exquisite pastries there. Nathan wrote about her in “Vienna in Cambridge,” a Boston Globe column.
Watertown’s Armenian grocery shops became a favorite, she told JewishBoston. She first fell in love with Armenian food when she lived in Jerusalem.
“My Life in Recipes” includes an Armenian recipe for yalanchi sarma (Armenian stuffed grape leaves).
In Cambridge, she met the noted Jewish folklorist Dov Noy, who deepened her appreciation for Jewish culture.
She and Gerson also became friends with Felicia Lamport and Ben Kaplan, the Jewish couple who introduced them to Martha’s Vineyard, where Nathan continues to spend summers.
Matzo balls—and specifically her mother’s “al dente” recipe—is the Jewish food that has most defined and sustained her throughout her life, Nathan told JWA’s Rosenbaum at the Brattle. She adds ginger and nutmeg to her own.
“It made me who I am. It was the one recipe that I can still smell. I loved my mother’s matzo balls. It meant more than just a dumpling and soup. It meant holidays. It meant family together,” she elaborated.
Nathan’s mother, Pearl, who lived until age 103, served for 70 years as a docent at the Rhode Island School of Design museum, which named its Cafe Pearl in her honor.
Nathan appreciates the way people have embraced Shabbat in new ways, she told Rosenbaum. “It’s a way of connecting to family when we live in such a fractured world,” she said.
A woman of boundless energy, there are occasional weeks when she feels a bit tired and hesitates about cooking Shabbat dinner, she acknowledged to Rosenbaum.
“But I do it,” she said. “When we’re saying the blessings over the challah, it makes me feel I’m doing the right thing and the comfortable thing for me and for my family.”
