On the day the planes crashed and the buildings fell, Joan Nathan found a little comfort in cooking.

        That dark Tuesday, the cookbook author was scheduled to fly from her home in Washington to New York for an appearance on the Food Network. After her flight was canceled and then her train came to a halt in Baltimore, Ms. Nathan retreated home to do what she does naturally — cook for family and friends.

May Bsisu of Union, Ky. (Michael E. Keating photos) | ZOOM |

        “My neighbors all wanted to be together,” says the author of The Foods of Israel Today (Knopf; $40) and other books on Jewish cooking. “So I cooked. We watched the gruesome news. We grieved and we ate.”

        Even in times of despair, people eat. But Ms. Nathan, who lived and worked amid the strife of Israel for three years, understands familiar routines of the kitchen also can help us survive emotionally.

        “There's something about the rhythm of cooking that helps, the everyday-ness of baking bread,” says Ms. Nathan.
       In much of the troubled Middle East, where convenience food or restaurant takeout is not an option, preparing meals is a daily responsibility. This can provide a distraction — however brief — to the violence, says May Bsisu, a native of Jordan and a cooking teacher and food consultant who lives in Union.

        She and her husband spent several days huddled in a shelter in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War in 1976. Yet she managed to prepare meals on a small stove — and, for a short while, to focus on food rather than the exploding mortar rounds.

        Ms. Bsisu's family later moved to Kuwait, where they escaped the Iraqi invasion and moved to the United States in 1990. But now, like many mothers, Ms. Bsisu is worried about the safety of her three sons — one who works in Chicago, and two who attend the University of Dayton.

        So to feel better, she cooks.

        “I cooked a lot last week and took food to my sons in Dayton,” Ms. Bsisu says.

        Her sons probably feel better, too.

Mrs. Bsisu's comfort food included olives, rice with lentils and onion, yogurt with cucumbers and diced tomatoes with onions and humus topped with chickpeas. | ZOOM |

        Cooking and eating with your family helps you to cope with such a crisis, agrees Noga Maliniak, Israeli emissary to the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati. When a terrorist bomb exploded in her small hometown of Hadera, Israel, in 1996, killing four people, she remembers her mother called quickly to say the family was unharmed.

        “But a half an hour later, my mother called again to tell us that we must all come to her house for dinner,” Ms. Maliniak says.

        That day — the same day as the bombing — her mother shopped at markets and then cooked. Ms. Maliniak made a quiche, her sister and sister-in-law also cooked. And that night, 17 family members sat down to enjoy the meal together, to give thanks for their lives. They even laughed a little.

        “My mother just needed to see us around the table,” Ms. Maliniak says.
       During these troubling times, eating and cooking can be a reassuring source of control. When terrorists crash planes into buildings, everyone is at risk, it seems. We can't control our fate.

        But in the kitchen, we can boil, roast, fry or mash potatoes. We can eat pasta. We are in control.

        No one suggests indulgence as a means to numb ourselves to the cruelty of terrorism and war. But cooking — especially for someone you care about — can help us live through it. And instead of just an emotional salve, consider preparing a meal as a small act of defiance. Life must go on, we must eat.

        And someone must cook.
        Contact Chuck Martin by phone: 768-8507; fax: 768-8330; e-mail: cmartin@enquirer.com.

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