Stirring Up Famous Names, Strong Recipes
My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories:
For longtime cookbook lovers, Joan Nathan’s name stands out as among the most prolific and generous authors of multiple decades. Often called the “Jewish Julia Child” for her 12 cookbooks, in her “My Life in Recipes” memoir, Nathan lets her insatiable curiosity and desire to share what she knows shine through.
Nathan’s charmed, mostly well-off youth reads as both a delight and protected from reality. While she was brought up with a moral code and expectations of a Reform Jewish family to lead an ethical life, much of what was happening around her seemed to make little dent. There’s a reference to segregation in one diary entry (she and a friend decided they didn’t like it), but the adult Nathan gives herself an easy pass as a 17-year-old visiting relatives in France in 1960, seemingly oblivious to their war-induced trauma.
Generally, the book skips past too many weighty thoughts. Names and juicy tidbits seem baked into every page, with Nathan in the thick of things. On one page she’s escorting Elie Wiesel around Jerusalem; on another she’s recounting the chance to meet Marilyn Monroe as a teenager.
The name-dropping begins in earnest by page 13—her father shares a sleeping compartment with Albert Einstein on a train from New York to Atlanta and suggests they are connected through grandfathers who were business partners—setting the reader up for all the names to follow. Nathan simply knew everyone who was anyone in the food world through her long, impactful career of food tomes (and these are tomes: this latest weighs nearly four pounds).
Barbra Streisand floats quickly in and out of a long paragraph about spending several days with David Ben-Gurion during Nathan’s time as the Jerusalem mayor’s foreign press attaché. Or there’s her close friendship formed at camp as a teenager with Kathy Boudin, the future Weather Underground driver of the getaway car from the Brink’s armored car robbery that killed three people, with whom Nathan reconnects after Boudin is released from prison.
She takes readers through her extensive travels, often but not always focused on finding Jewish food and cooks wherever she goes, as well as her books, experiences, and the people she encountered through other writing, such as time she spent interviewing M.F.K. Fisher as Fisher dealt with Parkinson’s near the end of her life.
The names, and the stories, just keep on coming; this is a book to take on in fits and starts, or it can feel like too much—especially when a life seems as charmed as hers, with so much seeming to work out so easily. That ease lasts until page 204—a one-page entry on “my first real encounter with sadness.” Even here, as Nathan recounts a pregnancy with twin daughters, one born stillborn and another who apparently lived only a short time, she does not allow herself to dwell—now or at the time. While never stating so outright, Nathan seems not to be a woman who wallows. “Nothing was really easy,” she says, somewhat unconvincingly while describing one of the many times her career leapt forward with solid support from others.
Her writing skips lightly through it all, with stories rarely taking more than two or three pages—making it easy for readers to dip in and out. She intersperses recipes throughout, opening with a chicken soup with matzo balls, progressing through many recipes from her German and Eastern European ancestors, then roaming through largely Jewish foods of the Middle East and well beyond, from Cuba to Vietnam—foods she encountered during her travels and jobs before and after she became a full-time food writer.
Nathan has much to be proud of in how she elevated awareness through her 10 cookbooks on Jewish and Israeli food, her magazine and newspaper food writing and interviews with famous chefs and food writers, her PBS television series, and the ways she gave back to her communities. That includes starting the now 50-year-old Ninth Avenue International Food Festival with a colleague in the mayor’s office (one of many jobs she seemed to simply fall into with the help of her many friends), garnering support from James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Edna Lewis, Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Kennedy, and George Lang along the way.
So many other marquee names appear, from Julia Child to Rick Bayless to Lidia Bastianich. Tom Colicchio stops her from choking with a deft Heimlich maneuver. Hugh Hefner gets a mention as the major financial backer of Food & Wine magazine when it launched; Nathan was invited to pitch articles to the magazine thanks to a friendship formed when she returned to New York after grad school with its founders, Ariane and Michael Batterberry, whose offices were for a while the former Playboy offices.
Through all the name-dropping, Nathan is generally kind about nearly everyone she mentions (making it oddly stand out when she mentions inviting Paul Prudhomme to an event and points out she had to borrow a chair large enough to fit him from a hotel. While his weight was hardly a secret, why did it feel necessary to point that out?).
Among the enticing recipes, many of which no longer sound exotic but surely did when first she encountered them: white gazpacho with almond and grapes, crispy potato onion bread; eggplant rounds topped with tahini, yogurt, and pomegranates; chicken with sumac; spanakopita (one recipe that lacked clarity—if you use frozen spinach, should you cook it first?); and of course, challah—for which she includes two recipes and delightfully real photos that illustrate braiding techniques, in which her ropes are not all perfectly, evenly formed. Like those braids, her recipes are replicable for home cooks, with the second challah version producing a fluffy loaf redolent of anise seeds and tarragon. Potatoes add moisture, fluffiness, and keeping qualities to this worth-the-effort bread.
It's important to use wild mushrooms in her polenta with fricassee of wild mushrooms—wild being important given the lack of many other strong flavors. Just a touch of Gruyere in the polenta and a bit of garlic and a sprinkling of parsley make the mushrooms’ quality paramount.
A Persian cucumber salad with yogurt and walnuts is delicious and easy; dried fruit plumps during the chill time, producing a great balance of savory and sweet with the mint and dill, crunch from walnuts and radish, and juiciness from the cucumbers.
Nathan’s orange marmalade will make this jam feel doable even for novice preservers, and her cashew tapenade offers a simple, balanced mixture of pulsed cashews, thyme, garlic, honey, and olive oil to serve with crackers.
On the other hand, salmon with preserved lemon was tasty enough, but the lemon overpowers the salmon and seemed quite salty (consider reducing or omitting the brine, or rinse the lemon first).
As is often the case with memoirs like this, the most engaging writing and stories comes at the beginning and the end—learning how the author came to adulthood, to be the famous person we think we know. The early stories then often morph into a litany-checklist of the people met, travels taken, fame-building accomplishments met—interesting enough, especially in a memoir stuffed with famous people. But the book’s midsection, while providing an interesting one-woman history of the rise of restaurants and food writers in our culture, offers just gentle bits with little spice.
The ending, however, turns back to a graceful, quietly emotional telling of her final trips with her husband of 45 years, Allan, and his sudden death near the end of 2019. She describes her passage out of mourning in the midst of Covid lockdowns—first in New Orleans when a planned five-day trip to help her daughter post-surgery turns into 53 days of lockdown, and later in Los Angeles. She closes gently on a note of hope with, true to her nature, a visit to a date farm sparking her desire to write others’ food stories again.
Quick takes:
My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories, by Joan Nathan. 450 pages. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.
Organization: 35 chapters take readers chronologically through Nathan’s life, with recipes interspersed.
Ingredients measurement methods: Volume always, with grams for many ingredients, but inconsistently (a stick of butter will be given in grams, but not 2 tablespoons’ worth; a recipe for “risotto” from ancient grains calls for freekeh, bulgur, and wheat berries only as 1 cup, no grams given).
Photos: Family photos throughout; color photos of some recipes.
Index: Comprehensive—for both name-drops and recipes.
The Spice of Life
Everything is better with Pepper
Fame underwhelms Pepper.
