QUICHES, KUGELS,
COUSCOUS
My Search for Jewish Cooking in France
OAN NATHAN
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91 S.
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Joan Nathan is scheduled to appear at this year's Jewish
Book Fair 11 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 2, at the Jewish Community
Center in West Bloomfield.
Vive
France!
The history of French Jews is told through its common thread of food
and Joan Nathan's glorious storytelling.
WRITTEN BY LYNNE KONSTANTIN
When Joan Nathan was 15, in the
1960s, she left her home in Providence,
R.I., for her first visit to France. Her
father, who manufactured thermostats,
believed fluency in a foreign language
should be part of a young girl's educa-
tion. "At the time, at that age, going to
France was a thrill. It was so beautiful
and exotic," says Nathan. "I went back
many times over the years. But when I
was a kid, I thought about France. I was
naively unaware of the history of Jews in
the country. Only recently, I realized it
would be great to learn more about the
Jews in France. So I went back to see if
there was anything there."
There was. Nathan, who earned a
master's degree in French literature from
the University of Michigan (her father
visited on business and encouraged her
to go there, at a time when Easterners
thought only of Eastern schools) and
another master's in public administra-
tion from Harvard University, worked
for three years for Mayor Teddy Kollek
of Jerusalem, then Mayor Abraham
P 1 2 •
OCTOBER 2010 • JN platinum
Beame in New York. And, of course, she
is the author of 10 cookbooks, among
them Jewish Cooking in America and the
New American Cooking, both of which
won the James Beard and the IACP
awards, as well as the forthcoming
Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search
for Jewish Cooking in France: 200 Recipes
and Their Stories (Knopf; scheduled to
hit bookshelves early in November),
which is the fruition of her personal
journey to learn more about her — and
our — ancestors in France. The book,
which centers on the fabulous and
fascinating recipes she collected in her
five years (plus a lifetime) of research,
is jam-packed with travelogues, history
lessons, a celebration of personalities
both famous and unknown, and tradi-
tion that is at once comfortably familiar
and exotic.
A few years after her first visit to
France, Nathan returned for a year
at the Sorbonne, and she frequently
visited a Parisian family originally
from Lorraine. "On Fridays, their son
Bertrand and I would go to a local bou-
langerie for a baguette to be blessed as
the challah, and his sister Nanou intro-
duced me to the pleasures of French
restaurants and cafes throughout Paris,"
Nathan writes in Quiches. "Seated in
the family's Louis XVI dining room,
the table appointed with delicate china,
we dined on Jewish food cooked with
French flair. ... The Passover seder ritu-
als seemed especially exotic. Prayers
were recited mostly in French, or in
French-accented Hebrew, making the
stories sound throatier, more urgent
maybe, and, to my ears, more resonant.
It all seemed so familiar, and yet so for-
eign. I felt a part of something larger,
knowing that all over the world, Jews
were gathered around seder tables on
the same night, reciting in their own
accents the story of the Exodus and eat-
ing foods that they called 'Jewish.' I later
discovered that Jews like this family
were shocked to be thought of as Jews
and not simply as French people."
When asked, many French Jews
would tell Nathan they didn't know any
Jewish dishes; they thought of the food
they ate as simply French. They may go
to a kosher butcher or grocery store, but
they bring up their children to se tenir
comme faut, to have French manners
at their beautiful set tables. "Yet when
older French Jews talk about the food
of their childhood, the dishes that smell
of deep memories and home, they most
likely recall their Sabbath and holi-
day food," writes Nathan. "Traditional
dishes like carp are served cold with
a sauce verte, a green parsley sauce so
French that it is even mentioned in the
cookbook of Taillevent, who was one
of the first to codify French cooking, in
the 14th century. Indeed, carp with a
sauce verte survives to this day mostly as
a Jewish holiday dish and is commonly
known as carpe a la juive even if it is
prepared with other fish."
During Nathan's first stay in France,
her visits with her father's cousin Rudi
Moos, and his wife, "gave me an edu-
continued on page P14