Today I’m chatting with the one and only, the matriarch of Jewish-American cooking––Joan Nathan. That’s right, Joan-freaking-Nathan!

What can I say about Joan Nathan that you don’t already know if you’re listening to this thing? She’s the James Beard award-winning author of 11 cookbooks, most recently King Solomon's Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World. Next year you can get her memoir-in-recipes appropriately titled Joan Nathan: A Life In Search Of Recipes.

Before we get to our chat, I mentioned last time that I started uploading videos from my recent trip to Israel. If you missed it, you can catch up with my video on Tel Aviv featuring a food tour through the Carmel Market with Delicious Israel. Since then, I’ve uploaded my visit to Jerusalem including a tour of the Machane Yehuda Market with Jewish culinary historian Joel Haber. And this Sunday, I’ll upload another video on my visit across Checkpoint 300 into Palestine. Head to YouTube.com/JoeBaur and subscribe so you don’t miss anything.

Now onwards to Joan Nathan. We spoke for a story and recipe I was working on about kishkes. I’ll leave a link to that below in case you’re interested. But besides kishkes, we talked about her impressions of how Jewish cuisine has evolved throughout her career, the dishes she ate growing up, and where she sees Jewish food heading next.

Kishke: Unraveling the Gut-Deep Culinary Traditions of Ashkenazi Jews