Joan Nathan's Jewish Holiday Cookbook Hardcover - 2004

Ashkenazic Apple-Nut Haroset
Makes 3 cups

6 McIntosh or Gala apples (2 pounds), peeled, cored, seeded, and coarsely chopped
2/3 cup chopped almonds
3 tablespoons sugar, or to taste
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
Grated zest of 1 lemon
4 tablespoons sweet red wine



1. Combine all the ingredients, mixing together thoroughly. Add a little more wine as needed.

2. Blend (you can use a food processor) until it reaches the desired consistency. (I like my haroset in large pieces, with a crunchy texture, but my husband's Polish family prefers theirs ground to a paste.) Chill.


Passover Roast Lamb
Serves 6-8

One 7-pound shoulder of lamb (see note below) Salt and pepper
1 clove garlic, cut in slivers
1/2 cup shredded celery leaves
1/3 cubed green pepper
2 tablespoons tomato sauce, or to taste


1. Preheat the over to 325 degrees.

2. Rub the met all over with salt and pepper. Place slivers of garlic in between the bone and the flesh. Place the meat on a rack in a roasting pan, surrounded by celery leaves and green pepper.

3. Allowing 20 minutes per pound, roast in the over. About 1 hour before it is done, smooth tomato sauce over the top of the lamb. This will make a crusty skin and all to the flavor of the gravy.

4. To make the gravy, first remove the lamb to a warm place and drain off all of the fat. Add a little water to the juices in the pan, leaving in the celery leaves and green pepper, and boil down on top of the stove. Serve with asparagus, roasted new potatoes, and mint jelly.
NOTE: A leg of lamb is basically a kosher cut of meat, but it would be extremely laborious and costly for a butcher to cut the many veins in the hind legs of the animal for the blood to run out. For this reason, kosher butchers prefer to sell the shoulder cut.

Joan Nathan is the author of eight books, including Jewish Cooking in America, which won the coveted IACP Julia Child Award as Best Cookbook of the Year and also the James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook. She appears on television cooking programs, including her own PBS series based on Jewish Cooking in America, and lectures around the country. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and also writes for such publications as Bon Apptit, Food & Wine, Cooking Light, and Hadassah magazine.

Nathan grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and was educated at the University of Michigan and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She worked in Jerusalem in the early 1970s as foreign press officer for then-mayor Teddy Kollek and was among the founders of New York's Ninth Avenue Food Festival under then-mayor Abraham Beame. Nathan lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, attorney Allan Gerson, and their three children.