When Shannon Sarna first met Jonathan Goldberg through mutual friends, she tried to “put him in the Friend-Zone.” They were young and living in Washington, D.C. at the time, and “he really wanted to date, and I really didn’t,” she recalls. But Jonathan had a car and cooking skills, and he used that to his advantage. He offered to drive her to the store for groceries and then to cook shabbat dinner together, a hard offer to refuse. Later he cooked for her again, and despite being 23, whipped up an unforgettable grilled eggplant dish with cheese and truffle honey, drawing on his Italian culinary school training. 

“It was an immediate connection over our love of food,” Shannon says of her now-husband of 15 years. And food hasn’t stopped being central to their lives — Jewish food, in particular.

Shannon is an acclaimed Jewish food writer, known for her work as the longtime editor of The Nosher and for her cookbook Modern Jewish Baker. Her latest release, Modern Jewish Comfort Food, is her debut’s largely savory counterpart, broken into categories such as schnitzel, latkes, and chicken soup. It’s an amalgam of Jewish foodways, including her own. 

Shannon grew up in New York state, with Ukrainian and Polish Jewish roots on her dad’s side and Italian heritage on her mother’s. Early in her career, the opportunity to manage a book tour for another author put her in touch with the breadth of the Jewish community in the United States, from Kansas City to New Orleans. But she first remembers falling in love with Jewish food at her friend Claire’s house, thanks to Claire’s mother’s prowess in the kitchen making classic dishes including a tender brisket.

“It felt like angels singing, the skies opening, and I realized this was why people love Jewish food,” she recalls. That’s because there wasn’t particularly great Jewish food being served at home, she says.

Shannon’s Jewish grandmother Bubbe Phoebe was never much of a cook. Her new book is still dedicated to the 98-year-old matriarch, who helped a young Shannon growing up in an interfaith household embrace her Jewishness. “I couldn’t have gone down this path professionally if I didn’t feel like a proud Jew, and I feel like a proud Jew because of my grandma’s love,” she says.

Because of her grandmother’s lack of proficiency in the kitchen and the tragic fact that as a teenager Shannon lost her mother to cancer, she doesn’t have the well of multigenerational recipes to draw on that are often the hallmark of Jewish comfort food. Shannon fills that void in part by leaning into what Jonathan and his extended modern Orthodox Ashkenazi family can share, including his grandmother Baba Billie’s potato kugel recipe.

It earned Phoebe’s stamp of approval. “When my grandma tasted it for the first time, she had one bite and she put her fork down,” Shannon recalls, “And she said, ‘This tastes like my grandmother’s potato kugel.’”

Now there isn’t a holiday when Shannon and Jonathan don’t serve it. He’s in the kitchen if it’s a special occasion, but Shannon replicates it for more routine family meals. “I made him teach me how to do it,” she says, “and I’ve gotten the seal of approval that I’m making it right.”

There is one Jewish comfort food Shannon associates with her family, passed down from her paternal grandfather, but it’s too simple to be considered a recipe — cooked egg noodles topped with a dollop of cottage cheese and a sprinkling of black pepper. 

“It’s like deconstructed kugel,” she says. “It’s really simple, but it speaks to the soul.”

Now, she’s sharing it with her kids, along with a broad range of recipes collected from both Jonathan’s family and people she’s encountered throughout her professional and personal life. She’s starting new traditions with dishes ranging from hamantaschen to sambusek. Her three kids each have their preferences, of course, but they’ll each grow up with food as a key layer of their Jewish identity. After all, it’s part of what brought their parents together in the first place.