Recipes By Joan Nathan
152 recipes found
Prepared Horseradish
Homemade prepared horseradish tastes fresher than store-bought varieties and is a surprisingly versatile condiment that will keep, refrigerated, for about three months. Start with fresh horseradish, which should be chilled to preserve its punch, and a box grater, a hand grinder or a food processor. Horseradish is potent, so make sure to keep the windows open or wear glasses to protect yourself from the fumes when handling the raw ingredient. Whisked into vinaigrettes, drizzled over poached fish or stirred into mayonnaise for a brighter egg salad sandwich, a spoonful of prepared horseradish wakes up whatever you're cooking.
Doro Wat (Ethiopian-Style Spicy Chicken)
Doro wat is a popular chicken dish in Ethiopia, and for Ethiopian Jews like Meskerem Gebreyohannes, it is also a fine centerpiece for a holiday like Hanukkah. Mrs. Gebreyohannes makes her doro wat with a Berbere spice mix imported from Ethiopia, but for this recipe, it is not needed, as the spices are listed individually. Doro wat is easy to make and can be prepared ahead of time. You can lower the heat by ratcheting up the sweet paprika, rather than the cayenne.
Provençal Veal Breast Stuffed With Swiss Chard
This Passover holiday recipe, an ancient jewel of Jewish Provençal cooking, feels modern with our new love of Swiss chard. It is traditional to use a whole veal breast with all the bones, but that makes for a giant roast by today’s standards. For this simplified but magnificent version, have a butcher trim, butterfly and remove the bones -- and save them to cook beside the meat, where they will add flavor and texture to the braise. The dish tastes best cooked a day ahead to allow the flavors to blend.
Honey Cake
This Hungarian honey cake is deeply flavored with ginger, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon. The dough is more like a gingerbread biscuit than a tender sponge cake; it softens as it sits. It’s best made at least a day in advance, resting until the icebox-like crust absorbs its sweet surrounding layers of filling. The buttery, vanilla-scented filling is so pleasant to the tongue — but so rich you may want to cut small cake slices. Hungarian honey cake was popular before the Holocaust, but sadly this version was largely lost with the cooks in concentration camps. It’s been adapted in the United States by survivors and other family members using Cream of Wheat filling, which resembles the European gruel made with semolina or hard wheat flour, and enriched with lots of butter. This special cake brings back the memory of their former lives.
Almond Cake With Cardamom and Pistachio
This moist and springy Persian almond cake is generously spiced with ground cardamom (two full teaspoons). We like it with fresh berries. If you want to serve it for Passover, be sure to use kosher for Passover confectioners' sugar; you could also use a tablespoon of matzo meal in place of the tablespoon of almond flour, but the cake is delicious without it.
Bukharan Plov With Beef, Carrots and Cumin Seeds
This Central Asian recipe uses medium grain rice, like Kokuho Rose extra fancy sushi rice, and sesame oil instead of long grain rice and vegetable oil, as the dish would be made in Iran. You can find Uzbeki cumin seeds and barberries online or in Persian or Russian stores.
Salted Peanut and Caramel Matzo Brittle
This is a more advanced version of the popular chocolate matzo toffee, but it’s still easy to make: A layer of caramel bakes on top of then soaks into the unleavened bread, which next gets slathered with peanut butter and topped with crunchy peanuts. For those with peanut allergies — or those who do not eat peanuts at Passover — you can substitute any creamy nut butter and nuts. You can also use tahini and halvah; add snipped, dried apricots or dried cranberries for color; or keep it simple and stick with chocolate — preferably dark, to counter the caramel’s sweetness — as in the original recipe by baker Marcy Goldman in her book “A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking” (Doubleday 1998). Be aware: This dish is addictive.
Beet and Barley Salad With Date-Citrus Vinaigrette
Have fun with this early fall salad, meant for Rosh Hashana but festive throughout the season. Bitter and tart greens, like arugula, crunchy romaine and celery, pair well with shallots or red onion, dates, dried figs, a handful of multicolored olives and crisp, refreshing cucumbers. About a cup of cooked barley adds chew, but you could use lentils or chickpeas instead for more protein. If you can find them, heirloom varieties of barley add wonderful nutty complexity. Beets — used in ancient times more for the leaves than the roots — currants and green grapes lend color and sweetness, as well as a pomegranate, the symbol of fruitfulness by virtue of its many seeds. All these foods are symbolic of fertility, abundance, and prosperity in the New Year.
Fried Artichokes
These deserve to be served as a separate course, eaten with your fingers. The basic method is the same for French fries — the first frying cooks and the second, hotter frying crisps. Roman cimaroli or mammole artichokes do not have the sharp thorns of our American globe variety and are picked before their chokes have fully developed, so I have made some adjustments to the original recipe to remove the choke here. Don’t let it intimidate you; the first frying and a grapefruit spoon or melon baller makes it relatively easy to manage.
Swiss Chard and Lamb Torte With Fennel-Pomegranate Relish
Festive dishes in Israel and throughout the Middle East often include rice and lamb. This magnificent recipe, topped with a bright pomegranate and fennel relish, is the Israeli chef Erez Komarovsky's twist on an ancient, labor-intensive classic of individual stuffed chard, cabbage or grape leaves, symbolizing the plenty of the fall harvest. It is perfect for Rosh Hashana or any seasonal holiday gathering. Make it with blanched Swiss chard, grape leaves or even cabbage or kale as the outer crust, and assemble it a day in advance. Then bake it and revel in the heightened flavors from the cardamom, cinnamon, fennel and mint; the crunch of pistachio; and the slight kick you get from the Mexican Serrano pepper now planted in Israel.
Salmon With Potatoes and Horseradish-Tarragon Sauce
Adapted from an 18th-century recipe by George Lang for his 1971 cookbook, “The Cuisine of Hungary,” this recipe layers roast potatoes with just-tender baked salmon and a fresh swipe of horseradish sauce. You could substitute the potatoes with carrots, beets or other root vegetables, or you could play around with more tender vegetables like zucchini or fennel, though you’d need to slice them more thickly and reduce the cook time in Step 1. Likewise, halibut, cod or another white fish can be used instead of salmon. The bright horseradish sauce keeps the salmon moist and gives this dish verve, pairing horseradish’s peppery punch with tangy sour cream and fresh herbs.
Chicken With Artichokes and Lemon
If you like artichokes as much as I do, this recipe, often made at Passover by Jews from Morocco, is for you. You can use fresh or frozen artichokes, though trimming fresh artichokes is worth the effort for their delicate texture. To save waste, boil the trimmed artichoke leaves about 15 minutes until tender in water with a lemon, then enjoy them for lunch, dipping them into an easy sauce of yogurt spiked with a spoonful of Dijon mustard. Easily made in a frying pan, this tagine goes well with couscous, or a quinoa or bulgur pilaf, though that might depend on your Passover traditions, and Moroccan Jews do not allow rice or couscous. The dish can easily be made a day or two in advance and refrigerated or even frozen.
Burekas With Spinach or Eggplant Filling
These little pocket pastries are adapted from the ones made at Congregation Or VeShalom in Atlanta. The women there make theirs with oil, which is traditional, but this version with butter is more tender. The dough is easy to work with and the fillings are delicious on their own; use any leftovers in eggs for breakfast.
Almond-Walnut Thumbprint Macaroons
These cookies are less sweet and chewier than many traditional nut macaroons. The recipe is from Eileen Dangoor Khalastchy, an 86-year-old cook and baker who remembers her mother making something similar when the family lived in Iraq. Ms. Khalastchy moved from Baghdad to London in the 1970s, but she remembers her mother making cookies like these and then sending them to be baked in the public oven because there was no oven at home then. Ms. Khalastchy has tinkered with the recipe, substituting walnuts for some of the almonds and adding an egg yolk to the traditional whites.
Chocolate Chip Hamantaschen
This tricorner pastry is as closely linked to Purim, a Jewish holiday which celebrates the Jews’ deliverance from a plot to kill them by Haman, as matzos are to Passover. Fillings of poppy seeds, nuts and dried fruits used to be as exciting as these Eastern European sweets got. But these days, unconventional fillings like marzipan, sour apple, dates with sweet red wine and cinnamon, and halvah are not uncommon. Here, a version for chocolate lovers.
Apple Compote
This vanilla apple compote is the perfect accompaniment to French potato pancakes.
Orange-Almond Mandelbrot
Mandelbrot (or mandel bread) is an Eastern European Jewish cookie, a variation on biscotti. The dough is baked twice: first in a log, and then again after it's been sliced into cookies. This recipe includes the smart trick of freezing the dough after baking it the first time, then cutting it into slices when still frozen before baking again. This makes for a thinner slice, fewer crumbs when cutting and a crispier texture. You can make it with matzo cake meal during Passover — a delicious variation.
Chicken With Eggplant and Swiss Chard
A version of this delicious Jewish-Middle Eastern chicken dish, adapted from Joan Nathan's cookbook "King Solomon's Table," dates to medieval times. You can make it in one day, but it's best to make the chicken a day ahead, then it refrigerate it overnight and remove the layer of fat that rises to the top. (If you choose to make it all in one day, you may want to use a fat separator to strain the sauce before serving.) For more heat, add a little hot paprika or cayenne.
Tabbouleh With Apples, Walnuts and Pomegranates
This grain-free tabbouleh, a perfect side for a Passover meal, comes from chef Michael Solomonov of Zahav.
Saffron Fish With Red Peppers and Preserved Lemon
This very flexible recipe is often served by Moroccan Jews and their descendants. Many who moved to France, for example, tend to prepare it with preserved lemons and olives. Others living in Jerusalem, like Danielle Renov, author of “Peas, Love & Carrots” (Mesorah Publications, 2020), might incorporate more spice. (Ms. Renov omits the saffron for Passover.) With the addition of red peppers and tomatoes coming from the Americas, it became the rich Moroccan dish it is today. Traditionally made with white fish, it also works with salmon or shad. Serve this as an appetizer, symbolic of the wish for abundance. Assemble it in the morning and cook it just before serving, or eat the fish at room temperature. For a main course, add quinoa or couscous to soak up the flavorful juices.
False Mahshi: Layered Swiss Chard, Beets, Rice and Beef
This is an Iraqi dish for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, with bitter Swiss chard, sweet beets and beef in a sweet and sour sauce. In Amara, a city near Basra in southern Iraq, the dish is called "mahshi" or "stuffed" in Arabic. It is traditionally made by stuffing Swiss chard leaves with beets, onions and sometimes meat. This version is called false mahshi, as the dish is made in layers.
Churros With Strawberry Sauce
Squiggly churros are a crispy, crunchy alternative to sufganiyot for one of the nights of Hanukkah. Serve them coated in cinnamon sugar and, instead of injecting them with jam, dip them into strawberry sauce — or raspberry sauce, Mexican chocolate with cinnamon, even guava sauce. For fluted edges on your churros, you’ll need a pastry bag fitted with a large French star pastry tip, but you could also use a resealable plastic bag with a tip cut off. To prepare the churros in advance, try this trick: Pipe the dough into 6-inch lengths on a parchment-lined baking sheet, then freeze. Fry directly from the freezer in oil heated to 375 degrees (mixture will bubble up).
Apple Cider Honey Cake
Alex Levin, the pastry chef of Osteria Morini in Washington, adapted this Rosh Hashana honey cake recipe from his grandmother, an accomplished baker, though he put his own touches on it. Mr. Levin took out the cloves, allspice and raisins, and added an apple cider compote to the batter, which moistens the cake and gives it a caramelized apple flavor that deepens the cake beyond honey and spice. With its combination of apples and honey, it's a lovely and symbolic finale for a New Year's celebration.
Pure Potato Latkes
Perfect for Hanukkah or any time of year, these latkes bring out the pure flavor of potato, because that is basically the only ingredient in them. Making latkes can be a last-minute nightmare, with overeager cooks putting too many patties in hot oil, thus taking longer to fry and resulting in a greasy mess. But these can be prepared in advance. This recipe, adapted from the chef Nathaniel Wade of the Outermost Inn on Martha’s Vineyard, starts with parbaked potatoes, which are cooled, grated, seasoned with just salt and pepper, pressed into patties and refrigerated, then fried just before serving. You can either serve them with crème fraîche or sour cream, smoked salmon and tiny flecks of chives, or traditional brisket and homemade applesauce.