^B00:00:01 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:03 ^M00:00:23 >> Mary-Jane Deeb: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the African Middle East Division. I'm Mary-Jane Deeb. I'm Chief of the Division, and I'm delighted to see you all here for a very special program to celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month. Today, we're hosting Joan Nathan, who, as our flyer points out, is a world-famous author of 11 cookbooks. I have my own copy of Cooking Provence - Four Generations of Recipes and Traditions. It's a fabulous book, and Joan is well-known to all of us. She has spoken here many times. And today, she will be talking about her new book, King Solomon's Table - A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World. But before that, we always do a little commercial about our division. And as most of you already know, our division is made up of three sections, the African, the Near Eastern, Hebraic sections. We're responsible for materials from 78 different countries in the Near East, Central Asia, the [inaudible], as well as from the entire continent of Africa, North and Sub-Saharan. And we're very active in acquiring and developing collections, briefing visitors coming from all the countries of the regions, for which we are responsible. We also invite scholars and experts who have researched and done work in our areas of responsibility, as Joan Nathan. And she has been a very frequent user of our collections, which is wonderful. This is why we cherish her as one of our very special patrons. And we do so, so that people get a better insight and a better sense of what those countries are about, what their culture is about, what their history is about. This is why we have these experts who make our collections come alive in our reading room. And we certainly collect cookbooks, and we have here the expert. We have Connie Carter, who is here with us, from the Business, Science, and Technology, who single-handedly has built this collection of cookbooks from around the world as one of the largest collection of cookbooks in the world on cooking. And she's made some of the most wonderful exhibits, displays here at the Library, always including a book of Joan Nathan. So I mean she's -- Joan has been everywhere, not only in our reading room, but in different parts of the library and in our collections. So we're really delighted to have her with us, to have Connie with us, and now to introduce Joan Nathan, we have our very own Sharon Horowitz, the Senior Reference Librarian in the Hebraic section, who will be doing the introduction. So Sharon? >> Sharon Horowitz: Yes, yes, sorry. Thank you. Thank you, Mary-Jane. Good afternoon, and welcome to you all. The -- my name is Sharon Horowitz. As you heard, I'm the Reference Librarian in the Hebraic section. The Hebraic section marks its beginning in 1912, with the receipt of 10,000 Hebrew books and pamphlets, whose purchase was made possible by a gift from New York philanthropist Jacob Schiff. From those humble beginnings, our collections have grown to around 250,000 items in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Persian, and other Hebraic script languages. The Hebraic section also includes an important collection of Ge'ez, Amharic, and Tigrinya, languages of Ethiopia past and present. Two of our missions in this division are to publicize our collections and to bring people into the library. One way we accomplish this second goal is by holding lectures and having programs such as the one we are hosting here today. One item of business before we begin, this event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcasting. There will be a formal question-and-answer period after the lecture, at which the audience is encouraged to ask questions and offer comments. But please be advised, your voice and image may be recorded and later broadcast as part of this event. By participating in the question-and-answer period, you are consenting to the Library's possible reproduction and transmission of your remarks. And also, I want to call your attention to a display of international Hebrew cookbooks and some of Joan's cookbooks that are in the -- toward the front of the reading room. Please look at them. They were arranged with the assistance of my colleague, Dr. Anne Brener. And now, a word about our speaker. King Solomon's Table - A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from around the World, as you heard, is Joan's 11th cookbook. In it, she shows the global influences on Jewish cuisine and what makes Jewish cooking unique. As one reviewer wrote, the notes accompanying each recipe are as enriching as the dishes themselves. She is a culinary historian and chronicler of Jewish cooks. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the Doyen of Jewish cooking, Joan Nathan. ^M00:05:52 [ Applause ] ^M00:06:00 >> Joan Nathan: Thank you, Sharon. Can you all hear me? Because I sometimes have trouble hearing. Is this -- can you hear now? >> Yes. >> Joan Nathan: Good, okay. First of all, I want to apologize that I had two books which I forgot. One was for her because clearly the publisher didn't send them to her, and the other one was for me. But that's okay because I can talk without my wonderful book. I love this place. This is the place that I really think of as home in Washington. I spent a lot of time here with my first few books, the Jewish Holiday Kitchen. I just spent -- I guess I had more time then. I don't know, or we didn't have the Internet I guess. I spent days and days in the stacks. And in fact, on my birthday every year, I liked -- I would go to the stacks. This year, I came to hear Anne Brener's fabulous talk on Raphael [assumed spelling] right in this exact room. And it was just a wonderful way to spend a birthday to learn more about Raphael. So this is my 11th book, and I always say that I don't think I could have written the book that I wrote last without the book for it. So this book is really looking at Jewish food around the world, how it came together. And because it's so popular all of a sudden, I kind of think that in a way Jewish and Israeli food is trumping politics, that it's way up there. People might not agree with the politics, but they like the food. And I think that really all over the world, people are looking for the new. They're looking for great ethnic food, and that's what we really love so much. And that's why there's so many new, exciting restaurants from all over the world. Thank you for doing this. So what -- the way that this book started was I had written -- I had written a proposal for another book, which was to be something on modern Jewish cooking. And I really wasn't that interested in doing it, but I don't think I ever admitted it to myself. So I took a trip to India, and I was in Kochi, which is, you know, Cochin. And I went to a synagogue there, and on the wall it said that Jews had been there since the time of King Solomon. And I started thinking, wow, since the time of King Solomon? And so, I looked at when King Solomon was. It was about 1,000 BC if there was a King Solomon. There are two schools of thought. There are some people who think that he's really a myth, and the myth of the one -- you know, the wise man and the king and that really there was no -- I mean I don't see how they can think there was no first temple, but they do. Other people think that he was -- he did exist, and I'm going to be with those. Anyway, he's a great metaphor for all that's wonderful and somebody who really likes good food. So what I did was I looked when -- 1,000 BC, and I went straight to an archaeologist named Eric Klein, who many of you might know from GW. And he said to me, why don't you come with me to an archaeological conference in Baltimore, which I did. And I met all the leading archaeologists, and they told me what they've been finding on food. And everybody told me to read a book by Jean Bottero on the oldest cuisine in the world, which I did read. It was from 1700 BCE, and the book was -- the book was on a cuneiform tablet written in Acadian on four tablets that are all at the Sterling Library at Yale University. And the tablets had a -- these 44 recipes, but most of them were for huge amounts of food. And they were for the gods because they were -- everybody believed in gods in those days. And -- but what was interesting for me, there were -- mostly were stews. There were some breads. You couldn't really tell what the recipes were. But there was one recipe for -- thank you -- for a soup, a borscht soup. And then there were all these other recipes. And what I was interested, what the ingredients were. So if you look at the top of the -- the cover of the book right there and you can see a bread. It's an Ethiopian Sabbath bread. And it's got these little seeds on it, Nigella seeds, that we're all rediscovering now. But these are some of the oldest seeds known to man. Then there was sesame seeds. Sesame seeds, if sesame seeds were existing then, it meant that sesame seeds came from China already and that they're the first ground seed oil. So they were ground into oil I'm assuming, and if they were ground into oil, you can bet that another ingredient that was there was chickpeas. The chickpea, the hummus was there. It wasn't as a recipe in this list, but this was something that was a gruel. That's what everybody ate, but as a gruel with protein so that people ate that for morning and very often for evening, poor people especially, as they still do in the Middle East. And one thing that I've learned since I've worked on the book was that chickpeas have been around for about 12,000 years in the area so that everybody had hummus, in case you're not aware of the hummus wars. Every single country had hummus, and the Proverbs of Gilgamesh, which are from about the same time, and nobody's sure exactly when, but they're certainly a lot earlier than the 1700 BCE cookbook. They mentioned chickpea flour, and chickpea flour was what you would have used in the winter. And of course, now everybody's so excited because everybody that's gluten-free is suddenly eating chickpea pancakes. And they think that they're 19th century Italian called farinata or they're 19th century French called soca. But they've been around for thousands of years. And so, I began to realize a few things. First of all, the timeline of Judaism, you know, whether or not it's exact is something else, but also the timeline of foods. There were -- I said there were beets. There were Swiss chard. There were -- well, there's dill. There were lots of ingredients that were used then. And the sesame seeds made me realize -- well, something else that an academic at -- no, the archivist of the Sterling Library told me was that the plates, the -- there were blue and white plates from China, the same pattern in China as in Cypress at that time. So plates were going around, and these blue and white also might -- we -- it's a surmise, but probably is correct. At some point, they were made in -- I know they were made in Iraq or Babylonia. Then they went north and eventually came to Scandinavia, where they -- to this day, there's blue and white Scandinavian china. But what else went from Babylonia? Cardamom went with it. And so, cardamom appears in cakes throughout Scandinavia because I always think that the spices are a byproduct really or something easily that you can carry when you're shipping big things. Anyway, so I looked at that. Then I realized that about 1,000 BCE, there was this man named Abraham, who lived in Or, which isn't that far away from Babylonia. How many miles? She knows by heart, about 300 miles I think. Anyway, and so Abraham, remember he took the idols and broke them. He was a monotheist. And so, he went on to the land of Canaan with his people, with his -- I think he was sort of one of the early communes with his wife, his cousins, his friends, and they set up -- they moved to the land of Canaan. And then we know from the Bible the foods that he found there, which I'm sure he had early on in the land of -- in Babylonia because this was the Tigris and Euphrates were in the Fertile Crescent, and there was so much growing there. So he went and he found these seven ingredients in the land of Canaan. He found barley, wheat, figs, dates, olives, grapes, and pomegranates. In addition, he found chickpeas. He found lentils. And he probably found fava beans, although they -- well, he would have found them by then. So these were things that -- basic foods that people had at that time. And I also realized that when the Jews went, of course, to Egypt, then they came back and built the first temple, which was with King Solomon, after King David. And the reason that I call the book King Solomon's Table were a number of things. First of all, in the Book of Kings, it says that the 12 tribes of Israel had to tie -- were tithed or had to tithe the king, King Solomon, with foods and also jewels and stones and peacocks, which they got -- I know that that was one of the things they got. And it was written from India that they found them as far East as India. So each month of the year, there was one group that was tithing the king. In addition, King Solomon, who as we all know was wise, he also certainly had appetites. He had 700 wives and 300 concubines. So each of these women would have brought with her food. I mean there probably were not 700. But anyway, that's why some people think he doesn't exist. You know, it's too many wives. Anyway, but if you go to a Buddhist temple anywhere in the East, you see the temple or the kingdom up top, and then in the front you'll see places for the concubines. And I realized it was a sign of power to have lots of wives and lots of concubines. Anyway, so to me King Solomon, his wives brought in all the spices, all the different foods, because you would bring that from home. Wouldn't you? You would bring what you were familiar with if you were going someplace new. And so, there were all kinds of flavors going on at his -- in -- at his temple and also at his palace, which was also on the -- you know, it was on the Mount, the Temple Mount. And I also knew from the Phoenicians that the Jews learned how to use day boats, which were wooden boats. And they would have been young boys probably. I don't think anybody else would have done this, that would have gone out and have gone as far as India and went -- was near -- were near India, and they would see all the different foods that were growing right on like the ginger and the cardamom and the pepper. So they'd see these spices that were so valuable and also were transportable. And they would gather them. Some of them would meet women there. They'd marry them, or they'd at least have children with them. And they would stay. Others would leave. In the 12th century, one of those little villages that I went to, Shanondaglom [assumed spelling] I think it's called, there was a synagogue. Well, you can bet that there was an earlier synagogue, and I say that because when I wrote the book of the food of the Jews of France, the one that Mary-Jane likes so much, when I wrote that, I realized that there were about 150 Jewish villages or villages that had Jews. They weren't Jewish villages in the South of France in the 1st and 2nd century AD. And these were all destroyed, and the only thing that might have been left and then some of them would be a cemetery stone or maybe an indentation in stone where a -- what do you call it? -- a mezuzah had been so that things -- and I know that one person who has studied Indian history a lot and has used this library a lot at first did not agree with me. And he said, you know what? You might be right, because he kept saying unless you see an example of somebody being there, how do you know that they were there? Well, history is a long time. And we're -- you know, a lot of these places get floods and all kinds of things, but anyway. And there were one -- you know, there were hints here and there that make you realize that of course they came there. So that was helpful to me. And then I realized that after the destruction of the first temple, many Jews went to Babylonia. And they stayed. And so, then they went at about that time on the Silk Route to the right. I keep saying the right and the left. But anyway, on the Silk Route, they went to places like Azerbaijan, to Georgia, to just all the way, all the way around up into Russia and eventually to Poland. So there's one group that's going around. Then another group went later after the destruction of the second temple through Egypt to Rome up to France to Italy to Spain. And then from Spain, they also went east in the 14th and 15h century through Alsace-Lorraine to Poland and Eastern Europe. So you find a conglomeration of people all over the place, and to me, that was really interesting because it was reflected in the food. ^M00:22:30 So I felt that learning about Iraqi food was very, very important. So I went to -- I couldn't go to Iraq. And what I like to do is get stories about people and food. So I went to London, where I was told the best Iraqi cooks are. And I met with a woman named Aileen Kolachi [assumed spelling] and who's way in her 80s. And she showed me how to make macaroons. Macaroons started in Babylonia. Escabeche started there. You can see through people where it wandered throughout the world. An overnight chicken called tabit started there. And people eating, you know, in the ancient world, chicken came late as far as being not -- there were kinds of chickens, but as -- the way that we eat it is -- first of all, it's really late because we had the -- remember those broilers? That's from about the '30s, the smaller chickens. Bigger chickens were there, but chickens -- hens were not eaten. You would take a hen that stopped laying eggs, because that's why you had hens. Then you would slaughter it and eat it. You would not take a young chicken to slaughter and eat it. And the same with cocks were used for cock fighting. And when they were too old for cock fighting, you would make cockova or something like that. Now -- and the rabbis would not allow Jews, but this is much later, to use cocks for fighting. Anyway, so there -- in the rabbinic literature, it says that in the first century AD the rabbis would not let Jews use chickens for cooking because they pecked around and they were dirty. But later, of course, they did. But they let them eat them in Babylonia. So you have this dish called tabit. If I had a copy of the book, I would read this wonderful quote. Is there -- is the book -- there are books, right? Just give me -- thank you. So the tabit was meant an overnight cooked chicken, and I wanted to learn how to make it. So there was this man named Mayer Sofer [assumed spelling], who might I'm sure came to this library who lived in Virginia. And -- thank you so much. And he said to me, I will -- I'll show you how to make it. So I went with him to his house, and I went with one of the Israeli ambassadors' wives, who wanted to go shopping in Tyson's Corner, and I said, "Look, we'll learn to make a chicken recipe, and then we'll go to shopping, to Bloomingdale's or wherever." So we went to -- and she was in her finery, right? So we walk into this man's house, and he takes -- he says to her, "Do you know how to sew?" And she said, "Yes." And so, he had skinned the chicken already, and she took the -- he took the skin of the chicken, and he showed her how to make pockets that she could put the rice in. And she really gave me a dirty look. But anyway, so she was -- needless to say, we never got on our shopping spree. ^M00:26:03 [ Laughter ] ^M00:26:07 But we -- I learned this really complicated recipe that was cooked overnight, and it was delicious. Then I realized, well, wait a minute, people are going to want to make this recipe. There are a lot of quick ways to do it. So then I went to visit Aileen Kolachi, and she showed me how she makes it. ^M00:26:25 ^M00:26:28 And I'll just read to you what I learned from her, which makes -- oh, my glasses. Are they right -- does anybody have reader glasses I could just borrow? Thank you so much. So -- and this is what makes doing the kind of work I do so much fun. On a recent trip to London, I visited Aileen Dangor Kolache [assumed spelling], one of those naturally great cooks who lives in an apartment overlooking Baker Street. Aileen, now in her late '80s, may have left Baghdad in 1975, but the family dishes decorated with rosebuds and fragrant with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, and turmeric remain in her thoughts and perfume her kitchen. During a delightful day, I learned recipes and listened to stories about Aileen's early life when some 20 people, mostly family, when family meant everything, lived in a big house overlooking the Tigris River. "At home we used the rice my husband's family grew," Aileen told me in her kitchen. "The rice often had small stones in it, so we had to clean it before we washed it. Then we washed it again, and again. The rice we get today is clean, but we Iraqis still wash it three times and soak it for a few hours. In Baghdad, we only ate fruits and vegetables in season, so we had to make and store what we needed for the whole year. We even made tomato puree for our cooking," she added. "In the summer, everybody bought a lot of tomatoes, squeezed the juice out, sieved them to remove the seeds and the outer skin, and put the juice in a big container on the roof of the house and kept it there for a few days in the sun until it became thick. Friday was the day to start tabit. There were no home ovens at that time in Baghdad, so the tabit was cooked on charcoal overnight for Sabbath lunch. On top of the cover, we put eggs in their shells, then covered it again," she said. "On top of everything was a folded blanket to keep the heat. We ate the eggs Saturday morning with tomatoes, onions, and lemon salad, with pickles or spring onions and parsley." Today, most cooks have learned speedier ways to make tabit than the one I described above. When I make it, I follow some traditional customs like using fresh spices I grind and cleaning the chicken with a lemon. Also, I make sure to produce enough hakaka [assumed spelling], known in Iran as tahdig, the prized crust of rust that forms on the bottom of the casserole. So, you know, images like that you don't get by talking on the phone with people to get a recipe. You have to spend a whole day at least because there's a lot that comes out. And I did that with women in Italy. With this woman, I learned a lot of recipes from her and other things that make what you're doing so very, very special. And then -- and then I realized that so much of this Iraqi food or Baghdadi food or Babylonian food spread throughout the world, even though they had people that came in that other conquerors, it was such a strong commercial center that it's -- when almost to the 8th century, it just was people wanted to live there. It was a fertile region. It was a crossroads. And the Jews started something called the Radonites [assumed spelling], and the Radonites were a group of traders that went as far as Russia, as far as China, and they were a network of people that would -- of merchants that would start with food, with buying spices. They'd buy gems. They'd buy -- I heard they bought fish. I don't know how they carried live fish, but supposedly they did, all the way around the world with -- and it was in a way like a relay race. And the known verbiage -- of course, the known language was Hebrew. But there of -- they were not the only groups, of course. I'm just talking about one group. This -- what I'm saying could be said about a lot of different people within that region. But there was one thing that made them different from everybody else, and that was their food and their laws of religion. So for me, there are three different ways of defining -- or three characteristics of Jewish food. One of them, of course, is the dietary laws, no question about that. Even if in the back of your mind you don't believe in the dietary laws, it's still there. And all the -- all the laws of Judaism are still there. So that's number one. And also, this obsessiveness about food, I mean believe me, it is. But I guess we're all obsessed about food. So then the second one is this merchant part of Judaism that just as they looked for ingredients in India in those ancient times, Jews have always been merchants and have always been looking for the new, maybe for the new for themselves, the new -- they've always been merchants. And that -- you can trace that all over the world. You know, they were the first ones to think of futures in the sense that if you buy grain when it's first harvested and you hold it, when you buy it when it's first harvested, there's a lot of grain, right? If you hold it to the winter, there's not so much grain so that you can raise the prices. And that's what a lot of people in the stock exchange learned from Jewish merchants, that this is the way things had to go. The -- I just -- there are bakers. There's a disproportionate number of bakers within Jewish communities because -- and just even look in Washington today, Mark Furstenberg at Bread Furst. And cooks, there are a lot of Jewish chefs too right now. But I have a theory about that, which I'll tell you later. Anyway, so the second one was the merchant and the interest in food. The third is the fact that Jews were kicked out of so many places. So they had to adapt their cuisine to different regions always. And I think some of you are nodding your heads. I'm sure that Indians and Lebanese and all kinds of -- Chinese -- have also had to adapt theirs. But the point is that you want to have the -- food is comfort, and you want to have this table-centered religion as comfort with the foods that you grew up with. And I'll give you an example. I was -- for the book, I went to El Salvador to interview the 100 people in the Jewish community of El Salvador. And there was this one woman, and they all made food for me for Friday night dinner. And a woman made yucca latkes with cilantro cream. Well, yucca is easier to get in El Salvador than potatoes. And so, that's what she used. And, you know, and you find that over and over again. I found escabeche, which is a fried and marinated fish, in Jamaica. And what do they serve it with? Scotch bonnet peppers because -- and also allspice. Now allspice too, so what I did in this book was I took the timeline of Jewish history, and I tried to combine it with ingredients. So when I went to Spain and then I went to the New World, I realized a few things. First of all, the -- 1492 being the time when the Jews had to get out of Spain, it was no coincidence that Christopher Columbus had his boat that started in 1492 because for the eight years prior to that, all the boats were rented for Jews that wanted to get out. They had a big -- there were like 250,000 Jews in Spain, and they had a deadline. So they got out. When Christopher Columbus, well, went, there were certainly Jews that were on the boats and that stayed in the New World. And then they brought back or else other people brought back to Jews that were called Turkish merchants. They were originally Sephardic merchants, but they didn't want to be called Sephardic because they knew they were being kicked out of Spain. There were also Portuguese that were called in France Mershon [assumed spelling] Portuguese, and they were Portuguese merchants that were also taking these ingredients and bringing them to places. Well, first of all, they came to Naples, which was a Spanish port. But then they went -- like, corn, peppers, tomatoes, and I forget what other one, potatoes -- went to places like Bulgaria and Hungary, always by the so-called Turkish merchants. And this was a fertile area of the Danube River. So they planted them. Most of those things were used for fodder at the beginning, and then eventually, like Jerusalem artichokes, people liked using them. But the potatoes, they were just grown for farms, that's it, not to eat. And even when my father, who came from Germany in 1929, when he came to the United States and there was all this good corn, he wouldn't eat it. He said that's just for animals. So I guess in Southern Germany, they didn't have really good corn then. So I realized that -- and the other thing that I realized in the centuries before where foods went. Where foods went were very easy for me to figure out their roots because you can see there's a lot written on it. And -- but it's really interesting to trace it, and you'll see it in my book. But the other thing that was a big, big help to me, and I'm doing all this academic stuff because this is the Library of Congress, is -- was the Genizah in Cambridge. So I went there, and I was really lucky because then Woodwright [assumed spelling], who was the archivist, spent a lot of time with me telling me about the ephemera. Do you know -- does everybody here know what the Genizah is? It's this -- you do, or you don't? Okay. So a genizah were like a treasure chest of documents. They say they were in Christian churches and mosques and in synagogues. And they -- they're lost documents of ephemera mostly. But they're supposed to keep everything that was written on sheepskin or paper with the name of God in it. And they found one of these treasure chests in the Cairo synagogue in about the end of the 19th century. And I mean it's -- there's a wonderful book called Sacred Trash that if any of you want to read, you'll read about the -- it's a wonderful detective story about how all this stuff was found and then how you read about different people. And there were letters so that I learned, for example, that there was a -- remember I said that there's like a relay race from Aden to Cairo, or it was called Fustat, which is part of Cairo today. And then some went to Ceylon, these boats. And then a lot of the heads of the boats would write these letters, and they would say -- write one letter to another merchant saying, "I slipped in some turmeric and other spices so that the -- so you wouldn't have to pay tariff on them." And you knew that these were from men for, you know, the -- for virility. And it's really interesting to see what went on just in what they wrote. And this was a way of endearing one merchant to another merchant, or there was wheat sent to a community in Aden because they didn't have wheat at the time. And, you know, you're supposed to make a wheat challah on Friday night. So you got senses, or one I have in my book, a woman who was a lousy cook, and her husband went out, and this was what you learned what people did. He had the shopping list because a lot of the women were kept in -- they were in their courtyards or at home. They didn't go out. And it was a way of a man saying, look, I made the money. So he would go out like on a Wednesday because it was -- you wanted to have food for Shabbat. He would go -- when he got his paycheck, if it was Wednesday or Thursday, he'd come after work, go to the market, and you can see it like in Machneyuda in Jerusalem today. Go there, he'd buy the ingredients that she said, and he'd bring them home. So he had this one recipe, this man who wrote a lot about his wife being a terrible wife. But my editor made me take it out. I don't know why. Anyway, so -- but she could cook. So he had this one recipe for Shavuot, one hen for the Sabbath, eggplant, and some other things. So I looked in old books because I realized that most things -- you know, that people didn't have different like a vegetable on one side, and that came later. They would have a stew pretty much. That's what you would have for your dishes, or, you know, a stew like a couscous, where you'd have rice and you'd have -- anyway, so I looked in old, old cookbooks for chicken with eggplant, and I had never known that as a Sabbath dish. And there it was in all of these Iraqi cookbooks and also different Sephardic cookbooks. And you realize a lot of the people that came to Spain came through Iraq so that -- and I'm convinced that they went back to Iraq maybe after 400 years because they still -- when they were kicked out of Spain, when they still had relatives there. And then they went around the world. So, you know, and then they went to India, because I met this woman named Queenie Halegwa [assumed spelling] in Kochi, and she invited me for dinner. And she kept talking about pastel. And her -- and I thought, wait a minute, this woman is not Sephardic. She's really Iraqi. And her son said the same thing. He said, "I think that our family was in Spain. They came back, but she liked that pastel, which is like a pastry filled with things." Oh, there are many different kinds of pastels. And then brought it back to -- hit comes in families, right, these words and these recipes. The other thing is there's no -- in the Genizah, there are no recipes. There are shopping lists, and then there are prescriptions from doctors, like Mimodenes [assumed spelling] would have written you need this -- you need chicken and chicken soup. And so they would talk about different ingredients that you would need. So the Genizah's really interesting. So please read that. So -- and then of course, food has changed tremendously today, and that's because of the world of 1850s on where we have all this rich food and the processed food. The Age of Industrialization changed everything and changed it very quickly. I'm convinced that in the ancient world, it took a lot longer time to -- for food to change. For us, it's within weeks. We've got email. We have radio, TV, cook -- how many cookbooks do we have? But it used to be that you would learn it from your mother, from your family. In a way, it was like the closed communities of today, but just family units. And that's -- and people would in different countries guard their foods so preciously within the community. And I've gone way beyond my speaking. Okay. So you can look at my book. I hope you will like it. It's got recipes from all over the world. And I've gone to a lot of places to get these recipes. I've got -- and I'd love to see if any of you have any questions because we can -- then I can answer talking about some of my recipes. Tamara [assumed spelling], you'd better ask about your mom, your father. >> Tamara: My father? >> Joan Nathan: Yeah. >> Tamara: My mother? My mother's from Rome. My father's from Bulgaria, and they did have pastel [inaudible] pastel. So I noticed when we spoke about it, you talked about it almost as a dessert. They -- the way they would cook pastel using eggplant and ground beef, so I wonder if you can -- >> Joan Nathan: Okay, so that -- yeah, well, that's in my book, that recipe from your -- okay, so what she asked the pastel that her father talked about was different from what I'm saying. A pastel can be a pie, a meat pie. And Tamara's sister, she's related to my husband, but her sister gave me two amazing recipes from the family. And one of them -- I mean her father's family thinks that they came -- they're direct descendants -- I hate to tell you a lot of people think that -- of King David. So she had a challah recipe that is so good, that is so wonderful that you can see that it went to the Balkans. It came from Spain up to the Balkans to New York, and now her sister's living in Israel. So -- oh, and Italy, she lived in Italy. So it picks up things, like her kids like hot dogs. Hot dogs are in it. She's got eggplant because they lived in Bulgaria. Eggplant is in it. And these -- that's what's wonderful about recipes. The pastel that she has, which is really delicious. I'm telling you. It's got eggplant and meat and ground beef and I think tomato. And you make it -- I make it with puff pastry. I think that's what she said to do, or no, no, no. I do not make it with puff pastry. I tell you, you can. It's a really easy pastry, and then you put it on the bottom, put this in, you know, and cover it. Delicious. Everybody loved it when I made it. So it's one of the great recipes of the book. Any other -- hi. >> Audience Member: Thank you. Thank you very much. It was very exciting. I'm looking forward to reading your book. I wanted to ask you. Since you were traveling with the food, what was being used to preserve the food, for example, the fish or the vegetables or whatever? What are their spices that are useful for preserving or for cooking things? >> Joan Nathan: Okay. Well this is a really good question. What spices or what ways of preserving things? Well, the ways were, you know, very, very old. Salting was the primary one, and that's why salt in a way was so precious. You could salt fish. You could salt vegetables. You could -- vegetables, though, the best way to preserve was in the sun. And just the way they took these tomatoes and put them on the roof, and they do that to this day. I was in a little village in Galilee, an Arab village in Galilee, and they were drying their wheat on the top of the -- for Balger [assumed spelling] on the top of roofs. So that -- you know, that's -- and of course, salting fish, salting fish, but also putting it in vinegar. A lot of vegetables were either dried, or the Italian Jews, for example, they would pickle their zucchini. But Turkish Jews would salt it -- I mean, excuse me, dry it and then I'm sure you've seen eggplant and zucchini put on long strings. So there were different ways, and this was so important. The Bedouins to this day still salt their yogurt to make it into fish. I mean excuse me, to make it into cheese. So it's very dry, and it's very salty. So you dehydrate it, and it won't be as salty. And you can use it in the winter as cheese. Yeah, so -- and then as far as spices, I'll tell you this. I think it's an interesting story. The spice allspice was from -- is from Jamaica. So I think that allspice came to England, was called English pepper, and there was another ingredient called cubeb, which was a little bit like allspice, a little bit like pepper, a little bit grainier. And that was used until allspice, which is very much used in the Middle East, came down to Babylonia from -- or to Baghdad from England, and it just wiped it out. No one uses cubeb anymore. But I have a feeling cubeb might -- it's like a berry. It might be Sancho pepper, and I'm not sure. Anyway, but -- so that things change. Yeah. Yes? ^M00:49:34 >> Audience Member: You mentioned that the early dishes were largely stews. This would sort of fit in with ceramic like pottery-type stuff that would only take indirect heat. But in all of your many, many, many studies, what is something about the history of where it was used? When did metal come in for the Jewish communities? >> Joan Nathan: When did what? >> Audience Member: When did metal cookware? >> Joan Nathan: Oh, well -- >> Audience Member: Ceramic crockery type things. >> Joan Nathan: I mean it came in late. You know, it was used like iron was used first. That was used very early, probably, I don't know, 12th century, maybe earlier. But a lot of metal came at the Age of Industrialization. You know, we were this -- last summer, my husband and I went to -- where was it? Marquette, Michigan. Have any of you ever been there? And there's this huge iron ore -- it's like an elevated iron ore -- I don't know what it is, to load the iron ore. It's maybe 30 -- it's as high as this -- as this ceiling. And you load -- they would come, and trains would go up to the top, and they'd load the iron ore, little pellets that they made. And I realized that this makes the -- and they would go down to Benton Harbor to make all the steel that we use. And I realize how really late processed all this stuff was. It was just people making it till then. But it was, you know, I mean individuals making it. And the Age of Industrialization just changed everything. Yeah? >> Audience Member: How many countries are represented in the book, as far as [inaudible] countries? >> Joan Nathan: How many recipe -- how many countries? Well, there are I think about 30 to 40 different countries represented in the book. And I could have -- now that I'm speaking around the country, I've learned that Azerbaijani, all these people, I mean Azerbaijan is in the book, but people are coming to me with lots and lots of recipes. They're coming to me -- oh, they say Haiti. There's a group of Jews that lives in Haiti. So I'm going to ask Jose Andreas if I can go with him to find these Jew -- I mean you know, I'm -- it's so interesting. I mean I always thought that writing these books, I would be bored after a while. I'm never bored. It's just -- you know, I get all these letters about -- I drive Sharon crazy because I want to find out if a Yiddish recipe, we can find it here that I can't find in any of my books. But, you know, and at the Library of Congress, I learned so many things. For example, I forget. Who was the man that knew so much about the collection who passed away of the -- ^M00:52:49 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:52:51 What? ^M00:52:52 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:52:53 Myron Meinstein [assumed spelling] was one, but there was this other person. ^M00:52:55 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:52:57 No. Anyway, but Myron would know. For example, sauce Portuguese, whenever you use a Portuguese sauce in the early cookbooks, it meant that it was a tomato sauce and that it was a Jewish tomato sauce because, again, these Portuguese merchants. And I'll tell you one quick story about the Portuguese merchants. They were very -- there was always somebody who was a doctor in the family -- in these Portuguese families. And there was one doctor named John du Sucara [assumed spelling], who I spent a lot of time in the Library of Congress before everything was digitalized looking him up and learning about him. And he was the earliest -- the only Jew living in -- what do you call it? Williamsburg, Virginia, at the time Jefferson. And you can see at Winter Tour [assumed spelling] some of his painting of him, and somebody wrote on the back, he introduced tomatoes to Virginia. And there was this I think apocryphal story that he was with Thomas Jefferson, and they were in Petersburg, Virginia, and Thomas Jefferson started eating a tomato because it was a member of the nightshade family, right? And so, everyone thought that they were just to look pretty. And he bit into it, and everyone went [gasp]. And of course, he didn't die. So people started eating tomatoes. I don't -- I mean I've heard that story from a lot of different towns. So I'm not sure if it's true or not, but I like the story. Anyway, but he really introduced them because he knew a -- because he was a scientist and because he had the experience of being a Jew and eating these things, again, within his insular family in London, and it was a well-known family. But he never married. He started the Wine Society in Williamsburg. His house, you can still see it, where he lived. You know, it sounds like he was a quiet man. I'd love to learn more about it. If any of you -- you know more about him? No? Okay. Another question? >> Audience Member: What's your theory about why there are so many Jewish chefs? >> Joan Nathan: Ah, oh, good question. What's my theory about why there's so many Jewish chefs? Okay, in 1968, there was -- a chef was a blue collar worker. So remember Paul Prudone [assumed spelling] and this guy Louie Sotmarie [assumed spelling] from the bakery in Chicago? They lobbied to change the assignation of chef from blue collar worker to white collar worker, which they did in 1968. And it took a while, you know? And all I could think of when that happened, especially now when there's so many Jewish chefs, is that Jewish mothers at that time wanted their sons to go to be a doctor or a lawyer, but now being a chef has a lot of prestige. So they were -- I mean I'm sort of being ludicrous about this. But I think in a way it's a respected career, and there are more and more and more. And I'm just amazed at it actually. And also, the reception of Jewish food, you know, when I was very young, it wasn't so popular. Anyway, is there one more question, or -- okay? >> Audience Member: Did you notice a major difference between Ashkenazi Sephardic and Mizrachi foods? >> Joan Nathan: Oh, okay. It was did I notice a big difference between Ashkenazi Sephardic and Mizrachi? Mizrachi means in a way everything else. So Sephardic would mean if a Jew went to Spain, but if a Jew is -- still can be Iraqi. In my book, I try not to use the word Sephardic and Ashkenazi because I think in a way it's irrelevant. It's sort of where each family journeyed. So I did find lots. I mean I for sure more than any other book because I went to -- I didn't -- I didn't always have to go to places. For example, there are a lot of Azerbaijani Jews now in Brooklyn. And there are Uzbeki Jews in Brooklyn with really good food, if you go to the families and other places around the country. So all I had to -- or Iranian food in LA. So I went there rather than traveling around the world. But I got some great int in by the way, and in Israel, I got a lot of great recipes, Bulgaria. Or you can get in Libyan food, for example, which is -- would go with the Mizrachi. You get that in Rome and in -- and in Israel. And you -- and you -- that's one of the cuisines that's going to really be going because there's no -- there are no Jews anymore in Libya. There are no Jews in Iraq. So with all the intermarriage between different kinds of Jews and between Jews and non-Jews, a wonderful cuisine like Libyan food is harder to make. And a -- it's going to go by the wayside, unless people like me try to capture it. But I really -- and what I did when I tried to do when I'm testing recipes, I test them like on a Friday or Thursday and Friday, like maybe six or seven recipes. And then I invite people for Shabbat dinner. And then they -- some of them I really trust because they'll be honest with me. And I think would I ever want to make this again? Because you -- I'm writing a cookbook for people, and if you don't want to write -- you don't want to make that recipe again, then forget it. So that's what I do, and it really works for me. Some people send out the recipes, but I like having a connection to my books and to, you know, what's in the books, and make it part of my life because I can -- you know, you can always tell the stories that go behind all these recipes. So thank you very much. ^M00:59:10 [ Applause ] ^M00:59:14 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E00:59:21