Joan Nathan’s list of the best Jewish cookbooks

Joan Nathan knows a thing or two about Jewish cooking. She is the author of over a dozen cookbooks in the genre, including Jewish Cooking in America, which won both the James Beard Award and the IACP / Julia Child Cookbook of the Year Award in 1994. (Learn more about Joan in her EYB author story.) Recently she spoke with Saveur, where she compiled a list of the ten best Jewish cookbooks. 

She starts off with The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York by Claudia Roden, which fittingly enough is the most popular Jewish cookbook in the EYB Library (Joan’s book Jewish Cooking in America comes in next). While you can still find copies of that epic cookbook, you may have difficulty finding the next on Joan’s list, The Israeli Cookbook by Molly Lyons Bar-David. “When I’m looking to learn about Jewish customs, I go to that cookbook. She talks about all kinds of customs. Libyan, Moroccan…every recipe has something above it,” says Joan.

Of more recent books, one of Joan’s favorites is Zahav by Michael Solomonov, who Joan feels “goes to the heart of Israeli cooking”. Like most exceptional cookbooks, this one tells a story, of how Solomonov embraced the food of his birthplace. See the rest of the list on indexed site Saveur.