by Lisa Richmon

"She's really good but you know she's got to be working all the time," she says. "I remember what my friend Jeanne Kirkpatrick said on a flight to Indiana for a speech. People on the plane were saying she should run for President. "'I just didn't want to do it enough,' she told me. You really have to have that hunger."

More motherly mensch than diva, Nathan's work centers on her family. Taking center stage in her urban Washington home is a working kitchen designed for testing thousands of recipes for her books. Conceived 12 years ago with Nathan's lifestyle in mind, it's a place where her three small children could gather while she worked in the kitchen or wrote articles in her loft-study above, always within earshot of her kids.

Nathan's kitchen forms an intersection between her roles as mother, wife and journalist. In front of the 10-foot-long island are three canvas chairs where Daniela, Merissa and David, now 21, 18 and 14, did homework, read and ate breakfast. A small window was installed nearby so that a scenic park would be visible.

At 12-by-30 feet, it's a true working kitchen streamlined for professional use. Everything is hidden behind white laminate surfaces: approximately 16 cabinets and 47 drawers. Beside the super-sized Traulson refrigerator-freezer with 2-foot deep shelving are Whirlpool double ovens large enough to accommodate a 25-pound turkey. The six-burner Dakor cooktop is set into the center island. By design a truly a modern kitchen, it made a statement about gender bias.

"My son was only 5 when we designed it. The drawers are low enough so that he could set the table," she says revealing her secret ambition to teach her only son utility in the kitchen.

Part of her home, the kitchen is a serious work space though not of warehouse proportion suited for a large staff of hired hands. And for Joan Nathan, "it's a good thing."

Like Martha Stewart, Nathan is not one to stand still. At 56, Nathan has traveled around the world. Part culinary archeologist, part anthropologist, she's been digging up the roots of Jewish cooking in America and dishing out the stories in her books.

As a teenager, she lived for a brief time in Italy and France and learned fluent French. Visiting other cultures and mastering foreign languages was something her father, Ernest Nathan, a German businessman, instilled in his only daughter. In Joan he would cultivate a culinary ambassador, who made the connection between culture and food at an early age.

"I was looking back on my diary when I was in high school and lived in Italy and France. I talked about the food a lot. After college, when I worked for the Madagascar embassy, I volunteered teaching English as a foreign language. The last day of school I asked everybody to bring food from their country and explain it. Even in my public administration work, the food was important. Culture is food."

Israeli press attache
Joan graduated from the University of Michigan with a master's in French literature and later obtained a master's in public administration from Harvard. With a strong desire to live in Jerusalem and her skills in foreign languages, particularly French, Nathan moved there and took a job as foreign press attachí for Mayor Teddy Kollek.

Her role was to take the foreign press around Jerusalem. It wasn't her mediocre Hebrew that landed her the job, though. As Kollek says, "Joan was the best and most intelligent candidate we interviewed."

Working in and out of Arab tents with her boss, she observed food's power as a great equalizer, she says.

"Teddy knew all about good food," says Nathan. "I learned from watching him that if you show interest in someone's food, you show interest in them. Rather than holding meetings in his office, Kollek would stroll around the city, stopping in little restaurants to chat and nosh on some stuffed vegetables or falafel.

"What he really liked to do was to visit his constituents in their own kitchens. It was not unusual for him to stop in the Armenian Church to talk with the archbishop and sample some yalanchi ë grape leaves stuffed with rice and pine nuts ë on Tuesday and on Wednesday visit the Church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem for a good debate over ma'amoul, date-filled cookies. Wherever he went, the marriage of food and politics opened doors."

The three-year experience in Jerusalem stirred a fascination that later developed into a fully-baked business concept. Her culinary evolution progressed and a first book, The Flavor of Jerusalem, was conceived, with co-author Judy Stacey Goldman.

Before returning to the United States, Joan met her future husband, Allan Gerson, at the Western Wall. Gerson was born in Uzbekistan and came to the U.S. from a displaced persons camp. They married in '74 and moved to Cambridge, Mass., where he finished his doctorate in law while teaching at the New England School of Law. Joan wrote for The Boston Globe and pursued her doctorate at Harvard's Kennedy School.

Also in '74, The Flavor of Jerusalem was published by Little Brown. But it wasn't easy to get it published. She sent it to 16 publishers without success. Eventually she did succeed, she says, because her book was different ë it was about people not just recipes.

oral traditions
Nathan's other journalistic credits include articles about ethnic foods and traditions for The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, The New York Times, Food Arts, and Gourmet, among others.

"The real satisfaction is that I'm recording the oral traditions of the Jews. I feel the urgency to get these stories on paper, especially the good ones, before it's too late."