Joan Nathan is the author of 11 cookbooks including her newest, King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World (Knopf). Her previous cookbook, Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France (Knopf), was named one of the 10 best cookbooks of 2010 by NPR, Food and Wine and Bon Appétit magazines. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times and Tablet Magazine. She has won James Beard Awards and IACP Awards and was named Grande Dame by Les Dames d’Escoffier in 2015.
Across from the ancient Agora in Athens is a line of outdoor restaurants with stunning views of the Parthenon. At one, called To Kouti, meaning “The Box,” are served the best zucchini fritters in Athens, even better than those I used to eat in Jerusalem, many years ago.
This recipe comes from Sara Yaech, a woman whom I met on a trip to Havana the week before Barack Obama visited Cuba. Descended on her father’s side from Turkish Jews who came from Istanbul to this Spanish-speaking country in the 1920s, Sara grew up with Turkish and Ladino food. An amazingly alive woman in…
Many families in Libya used to squeeze oranges and bottle the juice to be used all year round. According to Claudia Roden, in her magnificent Book of Jewish Food, using oranges in cakes was a particularly Jewish practice. These cakes, usually prepared with the tart Seville oranges that had to be boiled for hours to…
Jews serve horseradish, sliced as a root or ground into a sauce, at Passover to symbolize the bitterness of slavery. It was in Ashkenaz, what is now Alsace-Lorraine and southern Germany, that the horseradish root replaced the romaine and arugula of more southerly climates as the bitter herbs at the Passover dinner. Today, farmers in France…
Although gefilte innovation like the first jarred fish and the frozen loaves are taking over now, I still, as with many things, prefer the taste of homemade that I make twice a year for Passover and Rosh Hashanah. Before Passover, at what we call a “gefilte-in,” friends assemble in my kitchen with their own pots,…
The seeds of cultivated fennel, like eggplant, are said to have been brought to France by Jews and other merchants. Of course, wild fennel grows everywhere in the south of France. I have tasted this salad in many North African French homes. It is very simple, and a lovely counterpoint to all the more elaborate…
This recipe is adapted from Michael Selig of Little Rock, Arkansas. Bill Yosses, the White House pastry chef at the time, and I prepared it together and served it at the 2012 White House Passover seder.
This Syrian sweet-and-sour keftes recipe has been handed down in the family of Melanie Franco Nussdorf, who loves to cook the dishes of her ancestors who came to New York from Aleppo five generations ago.
In Jewish homes in France and all around the world, recipes for macaroons have been handed down from mother to daughter for centuries. Jewish macaroons are descended from the Ladino marunchinos and almendredas, both terms for almond cookies. In fact, during the Inquisition, historian David Gitlitz told me, crypto-Jews were accused of having bought almond…
Gedempte Fleysch—”well stewed”—that’s how Eastern European Jews prefer their meat. Slow cooking, of course, became a practical necessity with grainy cuts of forequarter meat. Because a brisket stretched into many meals, it was an economical cut for large families in Europe. Leftovers were ground up to stuff knishes or kreplach. The meaty gravy became the…
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