For Claudia Roden, food is inseparable from family and culture. For Matthew Fort, though, Middle Eastern cookery is inseparable from Claudia Roden.
Almost thirty years ago, a book was published that shook the world - well, the cooking part of it, at any rate. It was called A Book of Middle Eastern Food, it was written by Claudia Roden, and to call it revolutionary would be something of an understatement.
Roden opened up a whole new world to cooks, one that very few even knew existed. Her book introduced us to bazargan, the bulghur wheat and walnut salad from Aleppo; to raghîf alsinîyyeh, a thick, crusty pie that was written about as long ago as the 13th century, by the Arab historian and philosoper, Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi; and to the exotic orange flower water and rose water perfumes of the creamy pudding, muhallabia. Even now, it is difficult not to feel as Keats did when he wrote 'On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer': "Then I felt like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken." Claudia Roden guided me and thousands of other curious cooks through this fabulous culinary landscape with a mixture of humour, learning and delicate greed.
In the flesh, however, a less likely revolutionary than Claudia Roden would be hard to imagine. She is defined by the word "graceful". Her manner is graceful. Her hands move with fluid grace as she talks, and she laughs with ease. Her conversation moves elegantly from family history to food and back again, illuminated by an erudition that is stitched seamlessly into the narrative. She is the distilled essence of cosmopolitan Egypt, which she left abruptly, aged 15, when the property and businesses of all Jews were sequestered after the Suez crisis in 1956.
Three decades after A Book of Middle Eastern Food, Roden is updating our knowledge with a book called Tamarind & Saffron. It will not be revolutionary, though. Thanks to her, most of us now have at least a rudimentary grasp of tabbouleh, couscous, kibbeh and tagines. But it will be a more personal collection of recipes. "Half are classic dishes, and half are new ones that I have been collecting since the first book," she says.
The world has changed quite a bit since 1970. "When I started, there was very little written about Middle Eastern cooking. When I asked some relations to send me an Egyptian cookery book, the only one they could find was an Egyptian translation of a naafi cookbook left over from the war. Cooking was a kind of oral tradition, with recipes passed down from mother to daughter.
I had to go back to 13th-century manuscripts in the British Museum to find anything written about this type of cooking." Writing A Book of Middle Eastern Food became a way of recreating the culture she had lost, just as later the monumental Book of Jewish Food was a homage to her own Jewish roots. She remembers clearly how the Sephardic Diaspora provided her with relatives in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and how each family branch made its own distinctive contribution to the collective culinary culture.
Roden, who has three children, believes that "happiness lies in families". She regards family life and food as inseparable, and, at a time when there is real concern about the decline of family eating, her emphasis on the role of food in maintaining family ties carries particular weight.
Food, then, is rooted within family culture - cooking is a practical skill that serves the needs of the family, and her recipes are very much the product of everyday domestic experience. When she is compiling recipes for a book, she does everything herself, including testing each dish two or three times. Not for her a battery of home economists sorting out the details of the recipes. This makes producing books a time-consuming business. Tamarind & Saffron has been ten years in gestation. "Of course, Middle Eastern food is different in every country, and within countries. That's why I was so fascinated with researching newly discovered dishes, the kind we like to cook and eat today, such as fish kebabs and roasted red peppers with preserved lemons and capers."
Recently, Roden went back to Egypt for the first time in nearly 40 years. "It was a strange experience," she recalls. "Towns are derelict and overpopulated, but because nothing has changed, so much has been preserved. I went to a tea party, and all the foods served were dishes that would have been put out when we lived there. Egypt is still essentially the same benign, humorous country, even if the cosmopolitan side has gone."
This could be a description of Claudia Roden, herself. Except, of course, she personifies the cosmopolitan grace that Egypt has lost.
'Tamarind & Saffron' by Claudia Roden (Viking)