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Road Warrior
From El Salvador to Arkansas, Jewish foodie Joan Nathan teases out stories behind kubbe, schneken and yucca latkes.
SANDEE BRAWARSKY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS
W
hen Joan Nathan wanted to learn to make
kubbe (meat dumplings), she found a woman
from Kurdistan who sat on the floor of her
Jerusalem home every Friday and made them for 60
members of her family.
Nathan is a master at tracking down the keepers of
family culinary traditions, like the great-granddaughter
of an Alsatian settler in a small town in Arkansas who
taught her to make a snail-shaped pastry called schneck-
en. Whether through serendipity or advance planning,
Nathan manages to get invited into kitchens both lavish
and modest all over the world. Ever curious, she elicits
stories of migration, recipes in all their nuance and invi-
tations to return.
Every recipe in Nathan’s latest masterful cookbook,
King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish
44
May 18 • 2017
jn
Cooking from Around the World (Knopf), has a back story.
She writes of visiting El Salvador, where the Jews drive
to Guatemala to pick up their orders of kosher meat and
other ingredients. The country has one synagogue, and
when she went to a potluck dinner there, the sisterhood
president brought latkes made of yuca, a local root veg-
etable.
There’s a joyousness in her writing and an approach
that’s infectious, a sense that the reader too could wan-
der into an Indian home in Kerala and learn to make Idli,
steamed rice dumplings. Nathan understands that food
is about more than food and appreciates the great plea-
sure in breaking bread — better yet, kubbanah, Yemenite
overnight breakfast bread — with others.
The vegetables have stories, too, like a recipe for “Slow-
Cooked Silky Spinach and Chickpeas” from Athens,
which used to be cooked in a communal oven overnight
— the recipe has been around for 2,000 years. Her recipe
for a “Bulgarian Eggplant and Cheese Pashtida,” with ori-
gins in Spain, comes from the cleaning woman of a friend
of a man she met at a party in Jaffa.
Nathan grew up in Westchester, N.Y., and then
Providence, R.I. She says that her mother did little cook-
ing until Joan was about 18; their family meals were
made by a cook, and she remembers some great south-
ern dishes. Her father loved good food and food adven-
tures. One of the first times she realized that different
people eat different foods was when she was about 13
and living in Larchmont, where there weren’t many Jews,
and her family brought bagels from the Bronx to a neigh-
bor they suspected might also be Jewish.
Later on, when working in Jerusalem as Mayor Teddy