After years of documenting Jewish food traditions, Joan Nathan focuses on her family’s

Joan Nathan has spent her life exploring in the kitchen, trying new dishes and recipes throughout the year. But every spring, for the Passover Seder, he sticks to a menu that follows his own family’s traditions. The holidays start tonight.

“I think Easter tells us who we are, and it tells us, this is my family sharing with other families. Every year I get chills at Easter, because I realized that it started in ancient Israel. I mean, it’s in the Bible!”

Nathan has written a dozen cookbooks, documenting how food traditions evolved as Jews wandered around the world over the centuries. Now in her 80s, her new book is her most personal work yet, digging into her own culinary history in a combination memoir and cookbook called My life in recipes.

“I’ve been more nervous about this book than any book… It’s coming into my life, you know?”

He talked to Nathan All things considered in her Washington, DC kitchen one day in late March, as she prepared a version of a dish she’s eaten since she was a child: chicken matzo ball soup. And, like many Jewish mothers and grandmothers before her, that afternoon, she worried whether the matzo balls would turn out the way she wanted them to. Each family has its own recipe, be it light, fluffy, hard or dense.

“So my mom’s, hers were al dente,” Nathan said. “And my mother-in-law’s were very light. You know, she was straight from Poland.”

As with all stories of immigration, these family recipes evolved as people moved, fleeing wars or seeking a better life for their children. One example is a special combination that Nathan adds to his own matzo balls.

“I had ginger added to it [and] nutmeg, which I knew my father’s family would have used in Germany,” he explained. “Ginger nutmeg was a very common spice combination in the 19th and early 20th centuries.”

For Nathan, cooking matzo ball soup for Passover, or any Jewish holiday, just feels right at home.

“It’s the smell,” he said. “You just know that smell. Like my mother’s breast, I know; like yall, I know. I love those smells. It knows you’re home, that there are people who care.”

As the soup simmers, Joan walks into the living room where there are boxes of letters and books. These are some of the artifacts she has discovered from her family, including handwritten recipe books in German. One from her great-grandmother dates from 1927, written in purple ink full of recipes for desserts like kuchen and caramel pudding. Nathan’s new book is filled with his letters, journal entries and parts of these family artifacts.

This book is also a love story. Joan Nathan writes about her 45-year courtship and marriage to her late husband, Allan Gerson. He died just before the pandemic. She says that writing this book felt almost like a form of therapy.

“He was my savior. I would just write. And I would include him in my life, you know? So that was a way to really make him a part of my life. And I think it was very helpful. He really gave the my strength.”

My life in recipes also includes anecdotes from Nathan’s prolific career, his world travels, and stories of his collaborations with food luminaries including Julia Child.

“Julia had her 90th birthday on this; she was sitting right here on this couch. I had a party for her. She’s someone who just kept on living,” Nathan recalled.

“And he said to me, at 90, why should I quit if I’m doing what I love to do? And it made me realize a few things: that people who are younger around you as whatever you do, be positive, don’t talk about being uncomfortable or whatever, and also write thank you notes to everyone.”