In Jewish cookbook, author Joan Nathan takes readers around the world

It also is the product of research into the roots of Jewish cooking that go back to the time of King Solomon (about 1,000 B.C.E) and even earlier.

Nathan, who will appear at Bookmarks book festival on Saturday, is considered one of the foremost authorities on Jewish cooking. She has studied it for 40 years and written 11 cookbooks, including the award-winning “Jewish Cooking in America,” which had a companion TV show on PBS.

The new book “is a very historical book,” she said in a recent interview. “It’s really all of our cuisines — Jewish, Christian and Muslim — and where it comes out of refugees and immigrants.”

The book’s inspiration came from a visit to a synagogue in Kochi, Kerala, India. “On a recent trip there, I read an inscription suggesting that Jewish traders might have reached India from Judea, crossing the Indian Ocean during the reign of King Solomon,” she wrote in the book’s introduction.

She had a epiphany of sorts in that synagogue that pushed her to understand how Jewish cooking has spread

around the world. “I started learning how it all fit together,” she said.

Jewish cuisine is at heart the cuisine of the Middle East and the Mediterranean — or it was, at one time.

Unlike so many other cuisines, Jewish cooking is not tied to geographical borders. But until the 11th century, Nathan wrote, 90 percent of Jews lived in the Middle East.

Even then, Jewish cooking was growing and evolving because so many Jews were traders who “used the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean” as their major highways.

For example, chickpeas, original to the Middle East, ended up as a prominent ingredient in Indian cooking. Going the other direction, cinnamon, a native of India and surrounding countries, became a prominent spice in the Middle East and throughout Europe.

Eventually, immigration led to changes in Jewish cooking.

From about 1,000 A.D., Jews settled in Ashkenaz, their name for Alsace-Lorraine, an area of France that has been both French and German territory over the centuries. Here, Jews learned to use chicken fat in place of Middle Eastern olive oil and horseradish in place of Romaine lettuce or other bitter herbs for Passover.

Cabbage, corned beef and dumplings also reflect the German influence on Ashkenazi Jewish cooking.

“Then a lot of these foods went to Eastern Europe,” Nathan said. The dominance of the Catholic Church in Europe led many Jews to resettle in Poland, Hungary and other countries in that area. An estimated 60,000 had moved there by 1550. They took their Ashkenazi dishes with them, but also learned new dishes — such as borscht.

Later, pogroms in Eastern Europe led Jews to move to France, the United States, Canada and other countries, bringing bagels and brisket and yet more dishes across more borders.

“King Solomon’s Table” has about 170 recipes, a mix of historical recipes, contemporary recipes and many standards of Jewish cuisine — sometimes tweaked a bit for the 21st century.

Nathan became fascinated by Shtritzlach, blueberry buns originally from Poland, that is an iconic food for Jews in Toronto. This is a dish that virtually disappeared from Poland during the Holocaust.

“It really opened up to me what war does — not only to people but to recipes, culture and to civilization,” Nathan said.

Dishes getting a modern touch include borscht made with the addition of curry, apples and ginger, and latkes made with green chiles.

Other recipes in the book include couscous from Morocco, custard from Spain, t’beet (chicken cooked overnight in spiced rice) from medieval Iraq, breakfast buns with onion confit from Sri Lanka, meatball with cherries and tamarind from Syria, a savory tarte tatin (apple tart) from France, and a cashew-nut strudel from Brazil.

And, of course, the United States is represented with such dishes as classic American cheesecake and slow-cooked beef brisket.

Nathan said that the many intersections of ingredients and dishes and different cultures show how interrelated food and people have become.

“We are all layered,” she said. “So many of us are immigrants. Whether we are Jews, Christians, Muslims, it’s our commonality that’s so important, especially today.”