In 1968 Claudia Roden
publishedABookof
Middle Eastern Food.The
deining 20th-century text
on the culinary culture of
the region, it inspired cooks
to embrace couscous and
tabbouleh, seek out tahini
and eggplant, dive deep into
hummus and perfume their
lives with cumin, cloves and
cardamom. Here, Roden
takesusbacktowhenshe
irst put pen to paper.
Paper
trail
I
have a very clear memory of when I first began
collecting the recipes that would later form the basis
of my first book,A Book of Middle Eastern Food.It
was 1956, and the Jews were leaving Egypt in a hurry,
en masse, after the Suez Crisis. I was an art student
in London sharing a flat with my two brothers, and
my parents arrived as refugees. We were inundated by waves of
relatives and friends on their way to new homelands, not sure
where they’d be able to stay. Everyone was exchanging recipes with
a kind of desperation. We might never see Egypt or each other
again, but a dish would be something to remember each other by.
There had been no cookbooks in Egypt. Recipes had
been handed down in families. Some took out little notebooks.
I wrote everything down word for word – how much water to
the volume of rice, how and whether to salt eggplant, how
to know when the dough for pita was right (by feeling the
lobe of my ear).What I was collecting was a very mixed bag. They were
not just Egyptian recipes. Egypt in my time, the time of King
Farouk, and of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s revolution, had been
a mixed cosmopolitan society. There had been long-established
communities of Syrians and Lebanese, Greeks, Italians and
Armenians living among the Muslim and Copt population.
The royal family was an Ottoman Albanian dynasty and the
aristocracy was Turkish. The Jewish community itself was a
mosaic of families from Syria, Turkey, the Balkans, North
Africa, Greece, Iraq and Iran, attracted to what became the
El Dorado of the Middle East when the Suez Canal was built
in the late 19th century. Everyone kept up their special dishes
from their old homelands. That is why I ended up covering
much of the Middle East and North Africa. A larger number
of the recipes were Syrian and Turkish because three of my
grandparents came from Aleppo, and my maternal grandmother
was from Istanbul.