Claudia Roden was away at art school when political instability forced her family to flee Egypt, where Roden grew up, and join her in London. Her desire to collect the recipes of her youth led her to write A Book of Middle Eastern Food in 1968āand later go on to create more than a dozen cookbooks that combine Rodenās passions for both culture and good eating. Here, she talks about how it all started.
In 1956, there was the Suez Crisis. Britain and France had built the canal in the 19th century. They continued to man it until Gamal Abdel Nasser decided it was on Egyptian soil, and he nationalized it without paying compensation. So the countries attacked Egypt. In retaliation, Nasser banished all the French and British nationals, and the Jews were alsoāwell, it's sort of complex, how it happened with the Jews, but the Jews had to leave. It was a very traumatic time, as you can imagine. There were no cookbooks in Egypt, and there were no magazines publishing recipes at the time. And so I started collecting recipes, because one of the things that people were saying [as they were fleeing Egypt] was, "Do you remember that dish you made? Can you give me the recipe?" Which really meant, "Give me the recipe as something to remember you by."
In Egypt, the Jewish community was a mosaic of Jews who came from all over the Ottoman world in the 19th century. It had become the El Dorado of the Middle East. My family, three grandparents had come from Syriaāfrom Aleppoāand one grandmother had come from Istanbul, and we were related to people who came from Iran or from Iraq and from Tunisia. I was collecting all these recipes and people were telling me their stories. And when they gave a recipe, they also wanted to say something about themselves or their grandparents. They were telling me who they were, and also they were telling me, "We made this for Passover. We made this for Hanukkah." [Gathering recipes] became for me a thing about their stories.
In Egypt, we were very keen on food, because it was a society that was about entertainment. Some people didnāt cook, but they knew how to eat, and they complained if the food wasnāt just so. We didnāt think our food was specifically Jewishāit was the food of a country. We didnāt think about food intellectually. We didnāt care where it came from, where it originated. It was just what we ate. We cared about how it was. And for women, their food was a thing that made them worthwhileāthat their home had the best cook, or the best food, because they entertained so much. They didnāt share recipes with each other. They kept them to themselves, or only gave them to their daughters or their daughters-in-law. But once they were leaving Egypt, they wanted to give away their recipes, as a way of remembering.
I became like a collector. I wanted to know how the Iranians cooked, how the Iraqis cooked. I would go to the Iranian embassy and people would say, "Have you come for a visa?" And I would say, "No, Iāve come for recipes!"
I just read that 45 percent of the population has hummus in their fridge. And you know, when I wrote about hummus, people joked about the name. Humus: To make the soil rich, you mix up all these dead leaves, and cook! So they were laughing at that, laughing at ful medames, and calling it fool-me-damn. There wasnāt any pita in stores, so I gave a recipe for pita, how to make it. It was bread with a pouch. And people asked, "How can bread have a pouch?"
