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LONDON – If you’ve ever had a soft piece of pita through a plate of garlicky hummus and your family roots aren’t in the Middle East, you might have to thank Claudia Roden.
In 1968, the 32-year-old Egyptian exile, modestly titled “The Middle Eastern Cookbook,” gave the non-Arabic-speaking world one of its first detailed glimpses of this rich cuisine. Through hundreds of traditional, comprehensive and carefully tested recipes such as herb-speckled Lebanese tabbouleh and Syrian lamb kibbeh, he introduced western home cooks to the fine and comprehensive art of Middle Eastern cuisine.
Prior to his book, he had not found such a recipe book published in English or any European language. If you want to make baba ghanouj, you can persuade a Turkish or Egyptian cook to share family secrets passed down through the generations. But let’s face it, if you lived in England before 1968, chances are good that you’ve never tasted baba ghanouj.
During her 50-year career, 85-year-old Ms Roden has helped revolutionize the way British cook and eat. He taught them how to mix cucumbers with yogurt and garlic into a creamy salad, simmer lentils with cumin to make a heart-warming soup, and fold cheese and herb-filled phyllo into mushy bite-sized pastries.
As if that wasn’t a legacy enough, it also helped change the way writing about the kitchen was perceived, especially by women.
Paul Levy, chairman emeritus Food and Cookery Oxford SymposiumShe said her scholarship on food, of which Ms Roden is a founding member, is part of a growing cultural trend.
Elizabeth David, along with Jane Grigson and culinary writers such as Sri Owen and even Julia Child, said she deepened the conversation around food to address questions of culture, context, history and identity.
A dozen cookbooks, specifically “Jewish Cookbook” has produced a genre that is simultaneously literary and deeply researched, despite being essentially practical guides on how to cook delicious food.
When Ms. Roden began writing “A Book of Middle Eastern Cooking,” Ms. David had published a handful of Middle Eastern recipes—especially hummus bi tahina—in her extensive book.Mediterranean Cookbook” In 1950. But it was the work of Ms. Roden, who delved into the entire cuisine of the Middle East, both scientifically and deeply personal.
Chef, cookbook author and New York Times food columnist Yotam Ottolenghi says Ms. Roden has laid the groundwork for chefs like herself.
“The ‘Middle Eastern Cookbook’ has been around for so long that it feels like prehistoric,” he said, “and it was really enlightening for its time.”
In the midst of Britain’s current love affair with Middle Eastern flavors, it’s hard to imagine that cuisine wasn’t considered quaint and unappealing in the 1960s. Ms. Roden’s book was almost ignored when it came out just after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, in which Britain supported Israel.
“At that moment, nobody was interested in the food of the enemy culture,” said Roden, who describes himself as a Sephardic/Mizrahi Jew (Mizrahi is a term used in Israel for Jews from the Middle East and North Africa). “When the book came out, people always asked me if all the recipes were for testicles and pupils.”
On the edge of the lawn was a thicket of red-flowered fuchsia trees, reminiscent of the fluorescent bougainvillea on her family’s terrace in Cairo, where she lived until she was 15. That’s when he went to boarding school in Paris and never came back. until a quarter of a century later. By then his family had long been expelled from Egypt and his childhood home was gone.
Cairo memories
Claudia Douek was born in 1936 into a large, prominent Syrian Jewish family that had immigrated to Cairo in the 19th century. This was when the Egyptian capital replaced Aleppo as the region’s commercial center after the opening of the Suez Canal.
Cairo had a diverse, multilingual culture. Miss Roden’s first languages were French (as for all cosmopolitan Jews in Cairo), followed by Italian (the language of her beloved nanny), English, and Arabic. Her grandmother, who can trace her ancestry back to pre-Inquisition Spain, spoke Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), which Mrs. Roden assimilated and helped with her research and writing.Spanish Food” Released in 2011.
Along with her parents, Nelly and Cesar Douek, and her two brothers, she lived in a prosperous extended family circle with dozens of cousins, aunts, and uncles nearby. They met regularly for rich feasts scented with rosewater and fried coriander; every feast, wedding, birth, and even Sabbath meal was celebrated on a grand scale.
Ms. Roden describes the cuisine of Syrian Jews as sophisticated, plentiful, diverse, and deliberately complex and time-consuming.
“People would think you didn’t like them if you didn’t bother with a meal,” he said, handing me a slice of wine. homemade yogurt cakesouffle top with sparkling red candied blackberries. “You must have put a lot of effort into rolling the marzipan into balls, making the dough, stuffing the eggplants. It would be an insult to eat one cup.”
When Ms. Roden talks about her childhood, you can hear the longing in her voice not just for food, but for the whole way of life. Much of his work was an attempt to reconstruct the lost scents, sounds, tastes, and emotions that bloomed on that Cairo terrace. Recipes capture flavors; The stories it wraps around evoke the richness of a lost universe.
London-based cookbook author Diana Henry He calls Miss Roden our greatest living food writer.
“Wherever he is, he’s trying to recreate the Egypt of his childhood,” Henry said. “He’s had this very clearly in his head all these years, and it shows up in his writings. Reading Claudia is like going somewhere.”
In 1956, during the Suez crisis, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled Jews from the country. The Douek family left behind all their property, leaving Ms. Roden’s St. He went to London, where he attended the Martin School of Art and became a successful painter.
Nelly Douek’s kitchen became the meeting place of her exiled friends. They sought help in vine leaf wraps and honey pastries, and companionship in the memories they shared.
Although most of the cooking in Mrs. Roden’s childhood home is done by maids, Nelly Douek and her friends are in London chopping herbs, kneading dough, making stuffed vegetables and marshmallows, laughing and remembering a cup of coffee with syrup.
At the time, a family heirloom recipe in the Middle East was among its most closely guarded secrets. The thoughtless sharing of a recipe would be almost as bad as negotiating an unfortunate marriage for one of the children.
Things were different in exile. The exchange of recipes has become a currency, a way to communicate and express love. And women were more free to choose their husbands. (Mrs. Roden married Paul Roden when she was 22; the couple had three children before they split in 1974.)
In her mother’s busy kitchen, Miss Roden heard women ask the same question: “Do you have any recipes?” – whenever a cousin or friend comes. They shared the secrets of their cooking so when one of them prepared it rich orange almond cake or a tahini salad sprinkled with mint, they would remember each other and feel loved and understood.
Ms. Roden took notes detailing the regional varieties of rice and each cook’s way of cooking onions, tomatoes, and pita bread in oil.
“We all felt a very strong need to collect and record,” said Ms. Roden, adding that it’s all part of preserving culture and identity.
“If we don’t collect it,” he said, “it will perish.”
In this way, he collected more than 1,000 recipes and stories. Since most of the families that passed through the Douek’s homes were from the Sephardic Jewish diaspora, they became the cornerstone not only of the “Book of Middle Eastern Cooking” but also of the “Book of Jewish Cooking.” In addition, he spent 10 years researching recipes and traditions from other parts of the Arab world.
He worked on these two canonical books for a total of 25 years. But he’s not done. When her children grew up and left home, she also left to travel the world researching the books “Dishes of Italy”, “Dishes of Spain” and “Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon”.
On these trips he enjoyed talking to everyone about food and culture: people on trains and buses, waiters in cafes, and maids in hotels. He would ask them what they liked to eat and if they had recipes. Traveling solo, Miss Roden had a knack for being invited by outsiders to try a local specialty like octopus and potato salad from the Greek island of Skopelos in her latest cookbook.
“As I passed a family dining on their terrace, they invited me to share their octopus salad and a bottle of wine,” he wrote. “It was heaven.”
Mr Levy of the Oxford Symposium calls Mrs Roden a culinary anthropologist.
“He went around and did the equivalent of fieldwork, then dealt with it in a sophisticated, analytical way,” he said. “He’s a serious thinker.”
Academic and Artist
Of all her books, “Claudia Roden’s Mediterranean” is the most poetic, the most lyrical (with photos by Susan Bell), and perhaps the most combining her many aspects.
Containing 100 recipes and warm but warm prose, the book has a sincerity that shows that the meals she would cook if she came to her house were compiled from her lifetime travels. But instead of trying to faithfully record someone’s recipe, as he did with other books, he took the creative license to modify them to suit himself. There is an emphasis on vegetables and grains, and in many cases simplified, streamlined techniques (and even the occasional one-pot meal).
food writer black cuminMs. Roden, a friend of Ms. Lawson’s since she was 19, calls this book an epitome of Ms. Roden’s cheerful, generous spirit. “Reading the book is like talking to him in his garden,” said Mrs. Lawson.
“Suddenly you have all these delicious little plates in front of you and he tells you to dip something in olive oil. And you have an idea of what it would be like to sit on the terrace of his house in Cairo and watch the sunset.”
This, of course, is exactly what Miss Roden wants to do.
“Writing this book was a way to bring back my past,” she said, as the light radiated warm light into her garden, “and I’ve enjoyed all my memories.”
Recipes: Bullinada (Catalan Fish Stew with Aioli) | Yogurt Cake
And drinking…
A dish like this stew needs a wine that can cut through its creamy sharpness. As with bourride, a similar Provençal fish stew, rosé would be a great choice, or in this case, Spanish rosado, as long as it’s dry. Other good, dry Mediterranean roses will taste just as good as sharp white wines. Since this is a Catalan dish, I would love to try it with xarello, one of the traditional ingredients of cava, the Spanish sparkling wine largely made in Catalonia. A good kava goes great with this dish and is easier to find than a solid xarello. So is manzanilla or poodle sherry. Outside of Spain, try a Sancerre or a village Chablis. Picpoul de Pinet, a Provençal white, would be perfect and I tried some good versions from California. ERIK ASIMOV
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