Cooking Up Memories: Joan Nathan’s Sweet New Chapter in the Kitchen

There’s nobody bigger in the Jewish culinary world than Joan Nathan, cookbook author extraordinaire and a Grande Dame of Les Dames d’Escoffier, one of the food world’s highest honors. She’s written a dozen cookbooks and an acclaimed memoir; she’s also won multiple James Beard Awards (the Oscars of the food universe).

Her newest cookbook, “A Sweet Year: Jewish Celebrations and Festive Recipes for Kids and Their Families,” is an update of “The Children’s Jewish Holiday Kitchen,” a 1987 classic. It’s a fitting next chapter for Nathan, who loves to cook with her grandkids.

The book came out on Tuesday, Nov. 19. It’s filled with kid-friendly recipes designed for adult-child collaboration, like rainbow-colored challah and pasta with pesto and veggies (her own kids’ favorite), and even matzo pizza (more on that below). Nathan raised her family in Washington, D.C., but she spent her earlier years in Rhode Island and in Cambridge, where she did a fellowship at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She has a lot of fondness for this area, so it was fitting that we caught up.

“I love cooking with my grandchildren. It’s so much fun, and it’s a way to just have time together and it’s something easy for them to do—especially breakfast. It’s an easy thing, and it’s a way to get them out of their parents’ hair so they can sleep later,” she says. (Joan, can you come babysit for me?)

The key, she explains, is to get kids involved in simple ways: stuffing doughnuts with jam, rolling dough, decorating.

“So your kitchen’s a little messy? So what?” she says in her inimitable, down-to-earth way.

She’s also a fan of cooking in stages, now and when her kids were little.

“I’d make the dough myself, and then I’d wait for a moment when they were fighting, and then I’d say, ‘Hey, I have dough! Let’s make challah. They’d think it was spontaneous. For me, it wasn’t spontaneous!”

The book also reflects modern realities: Some recipes are streamlined for busy parents; others switch up ingredients that have fallen out of favor.

“I realized that I had to update it because people don’t cook in certain ways anymore. They don’t use fake ingredients. Your generation never uses orange juice!” she says, laughing.

Nathan’s other criteria?

“Every recipe has to have a story,” she says. “A recipe is not just a recipe for me.”

Find three family-friendly recipes below!