Joan Nathan, matriarch of Jewish food, is tasting Melbourne

RITA ERLICH talks to the Jewish food guru headlining the first Melbourne Jewish Food Festival at the Kadimah on Sunday.

On her first visit to Australia, American Jewish cooking authority Joan Nathan is doing what she has always done. She is exploring and tasting, and taking notes. She’s been along Carlisle Street, and after we speak, she is heading off for an afternoon tea of Melbourne’s best pasteis de nata (Portuguese custard tarts) and later, dinner at a Georgian restaurant.

On Sunday. she is the guest of honour at the first Jewish Food Festival, held at the Kadimah. She will be judging domestic baking, giving cooking demonstrations, and will be in conversation with food writer/broadcaster Alice Zaslavsky (a conversation moderated by me.)

Nathan is a matriarch of Jewish food. She has been exploring it, travelling for it, cooking it, recording it, talking, televising and writing about it for nearly 50 years, winning innumberable awards along the way. Her home base is Washington, her interest is the world-wide span of Jewish food. Her latest book, King Solomon’s Table (Knopf) is an exploration of Jewish cooking from all over the world. It is, she says, the book that brings all the others together. There is Sicilian eggplant, an Indian fish curry, Eastern European tchav (a green soup that includes sorrel), Greek zucchini fritters – and much more, all bound by her recollections and her knowledge of the food and its history.

Her next book, to be published in 2024, will be her memoirs.

Her first book, in 1975, The Flavor of Jerusalem, was, as the title says, about the food of Jerusalem. She had not planned to be a food writer; she had studied French literature at the University of Michigan, and then went to Israel. While she was learning Hebrew at an ulpan, a journalist writing about the range of people studying Hebrew there, suggested she apply for a job as the then mayor’s foreign press attache. The job had suddenly become vacant.