ON AND OFF THE MENU BALABUSTA

At home with Joan Nathan, the grande dame of Jewish cooking.

- HANNAH GOLDFIELD

A couple of years before my grandma Bev died, in 2016, I asked her to show me how she made her challah, one specialty in an impressive culinary repertoire. She padded over to a cabinet in her kitchen and retrieved, to my great surprise, not a handwritten recipe but a yellowed clipping from a newspaper. At the time, I felt vaguely robbed of something, but in the years that followed I released my grip on the romance of the family recipe. I didn’t make a copy of the clipping, or take particular note of any of my grandma’s techniques. (Except one: when it came time to proof the dough, she tucked the mixing bowl into her bed and switched on the electric blanket.) What she passed on to me was intangible but arguably more important: a love of cooking and eating and hosting, especially in celebration of Jewish holidays. For everything else, I have Joan Nathan.

You could make the case that Nathan is a household name, as long as you’re referring to a Jewish American household. If a Jewish home cook doesn’t own a copy of “The Jewish Holiday Kitchen” (1979) or “Jewish Cooking in America” (1994), she has at least encountered Nathan’s dozens of recipes in the