The Altar
Foodaism
The Altar
None of us cooks alone, even when we are alone. These are some of the people who’ve inspired me in the kitchen, whose presence is never very far when I cook or eat. Some of them I knew and loved, some I just read or watched. I always thought if I had a restaurant I’d have a shelf for their photos and books, the kind of altars that many cultures — Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindu — have to honor the kitchen gods, give thanks and keep the ancestors happy.
In these homes, a kitchen altar might feature a photo of a loved one, a candle, a food offering. I don’t have a shelf built in to our kitchen where we honor the people whose love of food inspired us. But, hey, I’ve got a web site.
If there’s someone you want me to post on the altar, please send me an email with a photo and a few words about the person who watches over you in the kitchen.
Joan Nathan’s Jewish Cookbook: More Than Food
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
In January 2023, dozens of Joan Nathan’s family and friends gathered at a sprawling Palm Springs home to cook for the celebrated Jewish cookbook author (and reviewer) and food journalist on her 80th birthday. A dozen of us worked around a center island stacked with produce, preparing dishes for the menu’s theme, foods of the Jewish diaspora. I made chicken-stuffed figs with onions and tamarind, a recipe I took from the Jerusalem chef Moshe Basson, whom Joan had long ago told me to look up on a visit to the city.
Nearby, the Chez Panisse alum and author David Tanis chopped fennel. Glenn Roberts, the founder of Anson Mills, the celebrated heirloom grain company, strapped on an apron and washed dishes. Shelly Yard, the former Spago pastry chef, walked in with a multi-tiered cake. Tara Lazar, the host, rolled through phone calls to the area restaurants she owns while also, somehow, directing the ebb and flow of event staff.
At that point, I’d known Joan Nathan for over 20 years, when a 2001 assignment to interview her for her book, The Foods of Israel Today, evolved into a treasured friendship. So it wasn’t surprising to me that a woman best known for collecting recipes genuinely excelled at collecting friends.
Joan Nathan: A Life In Recipes
Her newest Jewish cookbook, My Life in Recipes: Food, Family and Memories, is certainly about food — it features 100 wide-ranging recipes. But more importantly, it points, poignantly and repeatedly, to what all that food is for: bringing joy, meaning, and strength to family and friends.
“Who needs champagne?” Lazar shouted.
Just then, Joan came in and looked around at the controlled chaos.
“This,” she said, “is just what I wanted.”
At a time when Jewish life seems tenuous and in turmoil, Joan’s memoir is a reminder that there is something permanent, powerful, and affirming in our tradition and culture. No matter how dark the news may be, Jews for centuries have found respite in coming together and cooking the foods of our diverse communities, grounding us during uncertain times. Who’d have guessed that a cooking memoir is the Torah we need right now?
We all have Jewish food memories. Joan Nathan just happens to remember, research, and write hers better. The memoir’s glossy pages tell the story of her constant interest in food growing up as a child in New York through vibrant color photos and astute recipes: her immigrant father’s German family’s sweet and sour carp, her assimilated mother’s whitefish salad, the pletzlach of the Parisian Jewish quarters, mango poached in vanilla syrup from a sojourn in Madagascar.
“I realize that I learned to love exploring the world of New York’s foods from my mother’s side of the family,” Joan writes, “while from my father’s I learned the importance of knowing one’s own roots and the family recipes that kept memories alive.”
Becoming A Renowned Jewish Cookbook Author
The exploration continued through college and, eventually, to Jerusalem, where in 1971 Joan scored a job working as the foreign press attaché for the city’s charismatic mayor, Teddy Kollek.
Jerusalem was a graduate course in Jewish foodways, and as Joan explored the city, she gathered the stories and recipes.
Eventually, Joan Nathan hit on the idea of a Jewish cookbook that would enable visitors to get to know Jerusalem’s people through their recipes.
“We did this as a lark,” she writes, “and it turned into a profession for me.
The Flavor of Jerusalem, coauthored with Judy Goldman, came out in 1975, and it was a hit. Joan’s profession, which led to other Jewish cookbook classics like Jewish Holiday Cooking, Jewish Cooking in America, and King Solomon’s Table, not only helped generations of Jews set the table but expanded their understanding of Jewish peoplehood and history. Consider garosa, the charoset of the Jews of Curaçao: a mash of dried fruit, nuts, spices, and sweet wine rolled into balls to symbolize the flight of Sephardic Jews from the Spanish Inquisition.
Though not mentioned in the Torah, charoset explains, “more than any other food, the wandering of the Jewish people in a Diaspora that extends around the world,” Joan writes.
The memoir gives you an idea of the energy, focus, and precision that Joan, a regular contributor to The New York Times‘ food section, brings to researching and writing recipes and the stories behind them.
I saw it firsthand, many times. One day last summer, Joan and I walked into a Russian bakery in LA’s historically Jewish Fairfax district, our first stop of the afternoon on what I feared would be a fruitless search for the exact spinach-stuffed Armenian pastry that Joan remembered from a dinner party.
“That’s it!” Joan lit up, pointing inside the display case. Except that wasn’t it — it was instead a layered honey cake that Joan had also long been researching. She immediately asked the counter woman where she was from — Uzbekistan — and if she could come back and watch the baker make the cake.
“No,” the woman said. “I’m a food journalist,” Joan said, explaining that most Jews think of honey cake as dry and unexciting, but this looked more like the Hungarian version, which has a soft, gingerbread cookie-like crumb and creamy layers.
The woman’s resistance fell away. “He’s not here right now,” she said, “but you can come back.” A few weeks later, I clicked on The New York Times‘ website and there was Joan’s story on Hungarian honey cake. But some of those stories, just in the short span since Joan finished the memoir last year, have become infinitely more fraught.
Changing Times, Unchanging Love For Food
The optimistic post-1967 Israel that Joan first fell in love with has been shaken by the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and tarnished by Israel’s relentless response in Gaza. “It breaks my heart,” she said when I reached her by phone. “What else can I say? It’s awful what’s happened for Israelis, for the Palestinians.”
In 2018, Joan served as a consultant on a U.S. State Department project to help Syrian, Afghan, Turkish, and Palestinian women start food businesses in Istanbul. She cooked alongside them, she writes, “sharing our mutual humanity and building trust.”
Given the current climate, when even hummus is a social media battle cry, it’s hard to imagine such an event happening again anytime soon.
Late in the book, the chef José Andrés appears. An old family friend, Andrés, shows up with a brown crock filled with a rich chicken soup when Joan’s husband, Allan Gerson, a renowned international lawyer, is dying of a rare disease. Later, during Allen’s shiva, Andrés returns to Joan’s Washington, D.C., home, this time to make a comforting oxtail soup.
“I shall never forget how this larger-than-life, big-hearted man, who rushes to feed millions of people in crisis the world over, helped me, just an everyday friend,” Joan writes.
Israel’s killing of seven aid workers from Andrés’ charity World Central Kitchen, on April 1, brought yet more heartbreak and shock. The two have been in constant touch. “It destroyed him,” she said. “My heart broke for them and him.”
The sadness of what’s happening in Israel and the Jewish world today makes My Life in Recipes more relevant, not less. Strength and survival, Joan’s book makes clear, are with tradition, food and friends.
Her husband’s sudden death, at age 74, frames the book. The two shared a life of great food and adventure, and when Joan suddenly found herself bereft, it was her three children, extended family, and friends who filled her kitchen with food. Her community, she writes, “helped me slowly get out of myself and into the power of living.”
Joan’s Jewish cookbook, My Life in Recipes, turns out to be not really, or not just, about recipes. It’s about how a life with food helped Joan face sorrow, how the deep friendships she forged in the food world revived her spirit, and how the rituals and recipes of her tradition returned her to life.
They may just help us all return.
Passover Teaches The Lost Art Of Xenophilia
This column originally appeared in the Jewish Journal, April 17, 2017. Reposted with permission.
During the traditional liturgy of the Passover meal, the haggadah, we lift the matzo and say aloud, “This is the bread of affliction, let all who are hungry come and eat.”
When I was a child, my particular affliction was literal-mindedness. My family followed the 3 + 1 branch of Judaism — going to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, celebrating Chanukah, and holding a Passover seder. For Chanukah, there was no liturgy, and most of the words the rabbis and cantors mumbled during High Holidays were Hebrew — arcane and mysterious to me then.
But the genius of Passover is that it brings the service to the home and fuses it with a meal. The congregation shrinks, and the rabbi becomes that person whose questions or answers move you most.
In that intimate setting, the words hit home to me. More than anything else, seders shaped my Jewishness. I had time to read and re-read the words and, as I was prone to do, take them seriously. When it said to question, I questioned.
Oy, did I question. My uncle, an observant Jew, ran a very traditional seder. I asked him, “Why do I have to wear a kippah?” Why not a baseball cap? Did God really find the Dodgers so offensive?
Then it came to the part of the seder when we dipped our fingers in our wine glasses, then tapped our plates to symbolize our sorrow at the Egyptian blood God had to spill to free the Jews. Why, I asked my uncle, did he lick the wine off his fingers afterward — wasn’t that taking enjoyment from the Egyptians’ blood? That poor man. For years, he had to watch me make a show of wiping (not licking) the wine off my fingers like I was a murderer, erasing evidence.
Years later, I continued my antisocial habit. The haggadah declares, “Let all who are hungry come and eat.” “Why,” I asked my college Hillel rabbi, “don’t we go out and invite all who are hungry to come and eat?”
My liberal rabbi changed the subject.
Even more strange and mysterious than the Hebrew was why I believed some words I read to be true and others to be just fiction. I never thought for a second that the sea parted, that the Nile turned to blood, or even that 600,000 Jews ran into the desert all at once.
Yes, what I’m saying is, much of the Passover story we just spent two days reading always struck me as fake news. The story lacks hard evidence. But I still believe in its meaning and guidance.
At Passover, we 21st-century Jews slip into our pre-modern minds, when the facts of what happened don’t matter — there was no Wikipedia to record them, or Siri to recall them. What matters is the meaning.
“Since the eighteenth century, we have developed a scientific view of history; we are concerned above all with what actually happened,” Karen Armstrong explains in “A Short History of Myth.” “But in the pre-modern world, when people wrote about the past, they were more concerned with what an event had meant. A myth was an event which, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happened all the time. Because of our strictly chronological view of history, we have no word for such an occurrence, but mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and glimpse the core of reality.”
The genius of Passover is that it brings the service to the home and fuses it with a Passover meal.
When the haggadah tells us to remember the stranger because we were once strangers, I take it to heart. When I read that we have to think of ourselves as if we were slaves, even though there is no historical evidence that we were, I embrace the ethical imperative of empathy. There is so much wiggle room for the facts in the myth of Passover, but none for the truth.
“A myth demands action,” Armstrong writes. “The myth of the Exodus demands that Jews cultivate an appreciation of freedom as a sacred value, and refuse either to be enslaved themselves or to oppress others.”
In a series of interviews with Laure Adler, published this month in book form as “A Long Saturday,” the philosopher George Steiner zeroes in on this essential truth of Passover.
“Don’t forget (people forget this all the time),” Steiner said. “In ancient Greek, the word for ‘guest’ is the same as the word for ‘foreigner’: xenos. And if you were to ask me to define our tragic condition, it’s that the word ‘xenophobia’ survives, and is commonly used, everyone understands it; but the word ‘xenophilia’ has disappeared. That’s how I define the crisis of our condition.”
This Passover, I am hoping we Jews do all we can to bring that word, xenophilia, the love of the stranger, back into existence — and do I have to explain why?
The Exodus may be a myth, but when it comes to its lessons for this holiday, it tells the God’s honest truth.
Passover: Do You Know Your Family Story?
This column originally appeared in the Jewish Journal on March 21, 2013. Reposted with permission.
Bruce Feiler mentions Passover only in passing in his new book, The Secrets of Happy Families, but in some ways, the book is all about Passover. Feiler spent a year researching what makes some families more resilient, more cohesive, and happier than others.
And he learned that there actually is one common thread, one way, in which all happy families are alike: They share their family story.
“After a while, a surprising theme emerged,” he wrote in a New York Times essay about his book. “The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative.”
You see where this is heading?
Researchers, Feiler reported, have actually compiled mountains of data on this subject, even to the point of recording and transcribing the conversations of dozens of family dinners.
Do You Know?
Emory University psychologist Marshall Duke and his colleague Robyn Fivush developed a test that asked children to answer 20 questions about their family story. For example: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know the story of something terrible that happened to your family? Do you know the story of your birth?
They called their measure the “Do You Know?” scale.
“The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned,” Feiler wrote. “The ‘Do You Know?’ scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.”
Families that share their history drew closer together. They were better prepared to weather hard times. Even tragedies could be incorporated in a narrative that included many ups and downs over the generations.
“Decades of research have shown that most happy families communicate effectively,” Feiler wrote. “But talking doesn’t mean simply ‘talking through problems,’ as important as that is. Talking also means telling a positive story about yourselves. When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. …”
The Passover Family Story
Passover isn’t the story of one family; it’s the story of our family. It’s the shared narrative of our suffering and salvation, our exodus and deliverance, our slavery and our freedom, which we tell over and over and over “in every generation.”
The PR people for Feiler’s book sent me a blurb that promised “never-before-seen best practices” for creating a happier family.
Haven’t they ever seen a seder?
Using a story not just to create a cohesive family, but a happier one, Jews have been doing just that for thousands of years.
And just as it works in nuclear families, sharing a common story binds and strengthens groups of families and individuals.
In his book, Feiler mentions Passover in passing, counting it among the holiday celebrations that his parents and in-laws divvied up: Thanksgiving, July 4, Passover…
But Passover is unique. It’s not just another time for the family to sit and talk.
“And you shall tell your children on that day…” the haggadah instructs us.
Passover is the power of narrative enshrined as a holiday. At what other festivity do you sit around a table and eat and read and discuss the history of the holiday you’re celebrating?
It would be like marking July 4 by sitting around a dinner table drinking ale, eating chowder, and reading the Federalist Papers — which, to me, by the way, sounds awesome.
The entire Passover story, told in the haggadah (which translates literally as “the telling”), is a series of “Do You Knows?”.
- Do You Know you were once slaves in Egypt?
- Do You Know what happened at the Red Sea?
- Do You Know what it means that you, too, were once strangers?
- Do You Know what it means to fight for freedom? Do You Know what it means to remember?
“Dr. Duke said that children who have the most self-confidence have what he and Dr. Fivush call a strong ‘intergenerational self.’ They know they belong to something bigger than themselves,” Feiler wrote.
Passover takes that idea a step further: You are not just part of your immediate family story, you are part of a People’s story, which is part of humanity’s story.
“The bottom line,” Feiler writes, “if you want a happier family, create, refine, and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.”
Read that paragraph again. Substitute the word “family” with “People.”
And have a very happy Passover.
Canarino: The Herbal Tea Your Garden Makes
Paging through a vast, fun cookbook called Let’s Eat Italy, I came across a brief mention of canarino, an herb tea made with lemon peel and fresh bay leaves. Since my garden is long on both sides, I immediately set some water to boil, peeled a whole small lemon, picked and washed two bay leaves, added the ingredients to a mug, and poured the boiling water over them. I also added a squeeze of honey because it needed it. (I mean, what do those Italians know about cooking?)
So simple, so fragrant, and (so the book says) so good for your stomach. The scent of spring and early summer filled my study, and I am hooked. (Remember that when you support Foodaism, I’ll send you a bunch of freshly-picked bay leaves from my tree, so you can canarino on your own.)
I can see serving Canarino tea at the end of a holiday or Shabbat meal, letting it steep in a plunger pot so everyone can see the bright yellow color — canarino is Italian for canary. It just never ceases to amaze me, and fill me with gratitude, what a simple garden can bring forth.
Canarino
Ingredients
- The rind of one small lemon
- 2-3 fresh picked bay leaves washed
- 1/2 teaspoon honey or sugar
Instructions
- While your water is boiling, prepare the ingredients, then add to a mug or heat-proof glass. Fill with boiling water, stir, and let steep at least 7 minutes.
Turkish Stuffed Dried Eggplant (and Peppers)
Turkish stuffed dried eggplant is the perfect Purim food. I find new meaning — and something better than hamantaschen
My wife, Rabbi Naomi Levy, gave a sermon that changed my mind about Purim, a holiday I never really liked. Dressing up annoys me. Most hamentashen disappoint me. With its costumes, carnivals, and ear-splitting public readings, the holiday always struck me as Jewish Pre-K, something fun for the kids before the adults do Passover.
But Naomi had a different take.
In her sermon to Nashuva, the congregation she founded and leads, she recalled the moment two weeks ago when Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelenskyy met with President Donald Trump at the White House and was asked by a reporter for a rightwing website why he wasn’t wearing a suit.
“I will wear a costume when this war is over,” Zelenskyy told the reporter, reiterating something he had said many times in the three years since Russia invaded his country and tried to annihilate his people.
The world often hides its truth from us. Who could have suspected that inside a Jewish comedian lurked a Ukrainian warrior — certainly not Vladimir Putin. Zelenskyy’s lack of a costume was his way of giving his troops and his people hope. Purim, Naomi said, brings us a world where nothing is what it seems, teaching us to look more deeply at our world — and into our souls — to see the truth, the strength, the hope that is often hidden.
The literal Hebrew translation of Megillat Esther, or Book of Esther, which is read on Purim, means the revealing of what is hidden. Esther conceals her Jewishness until Mordecai calls upon her to save the Jewish people. Haman conceals his plot to destroy the Jews. Even God, whose name is never mentioned in the Book of Esther, is concealed — only to be revealed in the faith and strength of the story’s heroes. Purim, said Naomi, is all about being able to see what is concealed.
OK, so maybe it’s not just a kiddie holiday.
That aspect of Purim, making us alert to what is hidden and what is revealed, helped me appreciate Purim food, too. I grew up with the simple explanation that the triangle-shaped hamantaschen represented Haman’s three-cornered hat.
Understanding Purim Better Through Food
But Purim wants us to look deeper. Jewish foods are relentlessly symbolic. Taschen means pockets in Yiddish, and what do pockets do? They conceal. On Purim, it turns out, there are many dishes Jews traditionally eat that conceal and reveal.
Ashkenazi Jews eat kreplach, dough pockets hiding bits of meat. Ukrainian and other Eastern European Jews eat holishkes, or stuffed cabbage rolls, and Sephardic Jews often serve any number of fresh stuffed vegetables.
Last week I discovered a dish, new to me, that is perfect for Purim: Turkish stuffed dried eggplant.
A Turkish market, Bolmart, opened in Marina Del Rey, selling not only stuffed peppers and eggplants, but strings of the actual dried eggplants and red peppers with which to make them. The strings are beautiful — Naomi used them as a centerpiece for one of our dinners.
It’s a dish that’s famous in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep, where dried vegetables are a specialty and where a small Jewish community flourished from the 16th century until the establishment of Israel.
Dried vegetables, which you rehydrate before stuffing and baking, offer a more concentrated, earthy flavor. They are bite-sized, too, and easier to stuff — no coring required. In this recipe, I use a vegetarian rice stuffing, but many recipes use lamb or beef.
Who could suspect that after all these years, I’d find new meanings hidden in Purim — or a new dish with which to celebrate it?
Turkish Stuffed Dried Eggplant (& Peppers)
Ingredients
- 12 dried eggplant shells
- 12 dried bell pepper shells
- 1 cup rice rinsed
- 3 garlic cloves finely chopped
- Handful of flat-leaf parsley finely chopped
- 1 tbsp Turkish red pepper paste (biber salcasi)
- 1 tbsp tomato paste
- 2 tbsp pomegranate molasses
- 2 tbsp olive oil (for the filling)
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 2 tsp dried mint
- salt and pepper to taste
- 2-3 cups water
- 1 tsp sumac
- 30 ml (+2 tbsp) olive oil (for cooking)
Instructions
- Cut the strings of the dried eggplants and peppers, if necessary, and place into a large bowl. Pour boiling water over them and leave for 4-7 minutes to rehydrate. They should be soft. Drain and immediately refill with cold water to retain their color and texture. When ready to use, drain again.
- In a large skillet, heat 2 tablespoons. olive oil. Put in the onions and saute until soft, add garlic, pepper paste, tomato paste, parsley, spices, salt, and black ground pepper to your taste. Saute 2 minutes, add rice and bulgar, and saute a few more minutes.
- Add 2 cups of hot water and pomegranate molasses and mix well. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer, cover, and let cook 20 minutes. Turn off the heat, uncover, and let cool.
- Get a wide, heavy pan that will hold the pepper and eggplant standing up in one layer. Pour in 2 tbsp. olive oil. Spoon the filling mixture carefully into each pepper and eggplant, pressing gently for the filling to settle in. Leave about a half-inch space at the top for the rice to expand. Place them upright, side by side, packed tightly.
- Mix the sumac with about 2 cups of water over and around the stuffed peppers and eggplants. The water should cover half the length of the stuffed vegetables. Over a medium high flame, bring the liquid to the boil. Reduce the heat, cover and cook gently for 20 minutes or until the vegetables are soft and the flavors have a chance .
Notes
Jonathan Gold (1960-2018)
Jonathan Gold taught us all how to talk about restaurants. The best restaurant critic of his generation, and no one, since his death, has surpassed him. A kind, giving man was well. When I first came across his writing, long before the Pulitzer Prize, I immediately sensed the way he wrote the story not just of food but of L.A. — and I columnized on it. Many years later, when Jonathan Gold came to speak to my course on Food and Media at USC — a major schlep, a major favor — he left the students, and their teacher, astounded by his impromptu description of a meal at Noma in Japan. Read his works, and listen to an on-stage discussion we had in 2017.
Aaron Eshman (1927-2024)
I have a picture of my dad, Aaron Eshman, above my desk. He’s smiling. That’s the image I keep in my mind in the kitchen. He loved food. Restaurants. Every. Single. Meal. It was contagious. When he died last March at age 96, I knew I’d never have had as enthusiastic and hungry an eater at my table. But in many ways, I still cook for him.
Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018)
I hear his voice in the kitchen, too. Anthony Bourdain was the best food writer of this century. When he disappeared from our TV screens, so did great food TV. There are pleasant hosts, informative hosts, high-rating, engaging hosts, but besides Bourdain, they are all “okay”. He cared about the writing as much as the food, revered chefs, skewered pretension and hypocrisy (including his own), and never broke his first rule of food writing: Don’t Be Boring.
And he evolved. The surly prick of Kitchen Confidential turns reflective and forgiving in Medium Raw. His filmed travel essays went deeper. He seemed like less of a douche the more famous he got — the reverse of what we expect, no?
Now I pass a mural portrait of Anthony Bourdain on Wilshire Blvd. and feel like he’s protective, disapproving, and encouraging in one look. Up he goes on the altar.