Providence native and renowned cookbook author Joan Nathan has traveled far from her Rhode Island roots, but during a recent cooking demonstration and book signing at Eastside Marketplace, she fondly remembered the eggplant Parmesan from the Federal Hill of her childhood. "My father liked to eat and he liked to talk to people," Nathan recalled, "and I remember going up there with him. He would talk to people and get their stories. He always loved the stories."

And so does Nathan. Her books are full of them, including The Foods of Israel Today (Knopf, 2001), the updated edition of Jewish Cooking in America (Knopf, 2001), and the updated edition of her Jewish Holiday Kitchen, called Joan Nathan’s Jewish Holiday Cookbook (Schocken Books, 2004). These cookbooks emphasize the cultural and historical background of the collected recipes, and in so doing, they underscore the extent to which the Jewish people have spread out around the globe, adapting local ingredients to traditional recipes and keeping their holiday customs alive.

This is especially true for Passover, to which Nathan devotes an entire chapter in Jewish Cooking in America and the Jewish Holiday Cookbook. In her talk in Providence, she pointed out that though the Sephardic Jews settled in Spain and Portugal, they fled the Inquisition to lands as far-flung as Surinam and Brazil. She also observed that the Jews from Eastern and Central Europe are responsible for most of the Jewish foods found in the US.

To illustrate the way in which Jewish cooks picked up local dishes along the routes of their diaspora, Nathan cited latkes as Ukrainian, borscht as Polish and Russian, and matzoh balls as a direct descendant of Austrian/Bavarian dumplings. Though matzoh meal didn’t become available until the 1930s, she noted, crushed matzohs were used, with a bit of nutmeg in German ones and a dash of green pepper and cayenne in Cajun ones.

She uncovered dozens of different recipes for haroset, that fruit/nut mixture symbolizing the building mortar used by Jews during their enslavement in Egypt, and Nathan makes four or five versions for her own family’s Passover. In her books, she has included haroset variations from Moroccan, Libyan, Persian, Egyptian, Yemen, Venetian, Surinam, and American traditions. The Venetian one begins with chestnut paste and ends with brandy!

According to Nathan, the observance of Passover grew out of a spring rite by nomadic Jews, at which they roasted a sheep or a goat. Hundreds of years later, peasants in Israel held a spring "Festival of Unleavened Bread," connected with the barley planting ("matzoh" comes from an Old Babylonian word for "barley"). The seasonal aspect of the festival evolved into a holiday that now remembers the struggle of the Jews down through the centuries to secure their freedom, and the custom of eating only unleavened bread at Passover honors the ancestors who fled Egypt too quickly to let bread rise.

The meal of the first one or two nights of Passover has been codified into a seder (order), adding layers of newer symbolism to foods already associated with the seasonal celebration. In addition to haroset, other requisite foods at a seder meal are the karpas — celery, parsley or chervil, dipped into salt water, which stands for the tears of the Israelites; the maror — horseradish or romaine leaves, as bitter herbs, a reminder of the bitterness of enslavement; betzah, a roasted egg, representing the festival sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem and also a renewal of life; and the zeroa, a roasted shank bone, symbolic of the Temple sacrifice and also of the "passing over," when Jews smeared the blood of a lamb on their doors to ward off death.

Other foods associated with Passover are the above-mentioned unleavened matzoh, red wine, and brisket. Nathan has several variations of matzoh balls in her books, including one from a Lithuanian/South African/Pennsylvania woman (note the migrations). The four cups of wine poured at a seder signify the four promises made by God to the Jews, and the wine is said to represent the Red Sea.

Many cooks serve roast turkey or chicken for a seder meal, but just as many serve brisket — Eastside Marketplace sells hundreds at Passover, and one man asked Nathan for ideas on preparation. "Cook it slow and cover it with liquid," she advised, "to keep it tender." She explained that slow-cooking foods for Jewish holidays most likely developed to allow minimal work on the Sabbath.

America’s most recent contribution to the Jewish seder is broadening it from a gathering of family members to include friends and neighbors. Nathan cites an upsurge in community seders, gay/lesbian seders, and even a seder for Trappist monks led by a rabbi.

Prior to her food-writing career, Nathan worked for Teddy Kolek, the mayor of Jerusalem in the late ’70s, and she noticed that when he met with people, "whether Palestinian or Christian, he’d eat their food and all these barriers would break down." May that also happen at the seders this weekend, no matter what the barriers might be.