She's done "Good Morning America," she's done "Regis and Kathie Lee." She's done an hourlong documentary. And now she's done 26 episodes of her own show for Maryland Public Television. But Joan Nathan, journalist, scholar, cookbook author and TV star, can't get over the people she met and worked with in creating her show, "Joan Nathan's Jewish Cooking in America."

Her goal was to show how America has affected Jewish cooking, and how Jewish cooks have affected American cuisine. Her interest coincides with a national trend toward cookbooks that focus closely on a particular region or type of cuisine, and a number of recent books have focused on aspects of Jewish cuisine.

Although Nathan's show is based loosely on her 1994 cookbook, "Jewish Cooking in America," which features Jewish recipes and culture, the show ended up being mostly about people.

"The most surprising thing to me," she said, "was how good these natural cooks are" before the camera. "Like Dora Solganik - she just took it over."

Solganik, a Cleveland grandmother, who turned out to be not just a woman with a great way with gefilte fish but also a natural performer - real and funny.

"They were calling her Mel Brooks' older gefilte fish but also a natural performer - real and funny.

"They were calling her Mel Brooks' older sister," Nathan said, referring to the crew from Frappe Productions and MPT who filmed Solganik at Nathan's home in the Washington suburbs. "She was complaining about the high price of gefilte fish - she was very funny."

Or take Fred Loeb, retired baker, whose house outside the District has become a regular stop for Nathan and her three children, as each child turns 13 and faces the Jewish rite of passage, the bar or bat mitzvah. Loeb's house is where they learn to make challah, the bread associated with special meals.

Nathan discovered Loeb the way she discovered most of her unlikely TV personalities - through her wide connections, familial and professional ("She's amazingly well-connected," said the show's executive producer and director, Charles Pinsky). Her cousin was a fan of Loeb's DeLuxe Bakery, and persuaded Nathan to visit.

Now, on a hot summer afternoon, Loeb, Nathan, her son David Gerson (it's his bar mitzvah this time), three of his friends, her daughter Merissa Gerson, an aide who's handling Nathan's personal appearances, a woman from Bloomingdale's (where Loeb represents a line of cookware and bakeware), a photographer and another visitor are all crowded into Loeb's basement watching the boys struggle with braiding the six-stranded challah loaves.

"Left, left," Loeb says, pointing to the appropriate strands, sounding like a drill sergeant. But if the loaves are a little lopsided, he quietly shows them how to pat and nip to make them better.

The seeds of the show were planted a few years ago at a lunch with Nathan and John Potthast of Maryland Public Television. The two had worked together on her documentary, "Passover: )) Tradition of Freedom," and Nathan had some ideas for new projects.

"Some of them were pretty good ideas," Potthast said, "but I just looked at her and said, 'Joan, what you should be doing is a TV series about your book. It's your subject, you should just do it.' "

Nathan, who's the author of three other cookbooks and co-author of another, and who writes frequently for publications such as the New York Times and FoodArts magazine, grew up being interested in "people and food," she said. When she was still a child in Rhode Island, her father encouraged her to learn languages and to travel.

After college she went to Israel and worked for the then-mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, learning in the process about Jews, Muslims and Christians. She went to Boston, studied at Harvard, worked in New York. These days she is widely regarded as an authority in the field of Jewish cooking and culture.

Marcy Goldman, a professional baker, free-lance writer and recent cookbook author (see accompanying story), called her "the Jewish Julia Child."

"She's the doyenne and the voice of Jewish cooking in America," Goldman said. "People see her as a great source, a documenter of Jewish recipes and a researcher of culture."

Pinsky said, "Joan's whole adult life has been to look at the way Jewish food and culture come together."

That prepared her for her role as host of the TV show - because television isn't about recipes, or even about customs, he said. "The whole series came down to finding wonderful people who could prepare the food."

Nathan admits she was nervous about carrying a show. "I wouldn't look at the tapes for months, I was so scared." But Potthast had plenty of advice. "John told me the biggest problem with most interviewers is they're thinking about their FTC next question. He told me, 'You have to learn to listen.' "

Over a period of nearly a year, Nathan and her crew traveled and listened and shot miles of videotape. They listened to "Mr. Brisket," Sanford Herskovitz of Cleveland, whose secret ingredient is Coca-Cola. They listened to Benny Moskovitz of Oak Park, Mich., a baker who told stories of his mother's baking in his boyhood home in Czechoslovakia. They listened to Adam Tihany, designer of some of the country's most celebrated restaurants (Le Cirque 2000, Biba's in Boston), whose mother survived the Holocaust and still makes his childhood favorites, such as a cold Transylvania cherry soup.

They went to the famed Carnegie Deli in New York, and visited with Cuban Jews in Miami. They found Isak Barayev's Uzbekistan Tandoori Bakery in Queens, where he makes the flatbread that is a tradition perhaps 2,500 years old.

Every site enchanted her. "I think the most interesting thing to me is the discovery," she said.

Nathan's next project will be about the food and culture of Israel - all the cultures. She's also shooting more shows for "Jewish Cooking in America" in Baltimore and in Philadelphia.

But for the moment, she's worrying about whether her son and his friends are getting the lessons of the challah baking and about the food for David's bar mitzvah weekend - much of which she is preparing. But she can laugh about that. "On Sunday evening I think we'll all go out for Chinese," she said.

Joan Nathan and Fred Loeb will be doing a cooking demonstration and book-signing from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Sept. 27 at Bloomingdale's in White Flint. Loeb will be preparing recipes from the book "Jewish Cooking in America."

Pub Date: 9/09/98