A 1973 Penguin reprint of
A Book of Middle Eastern
Food by Claudia Roden,
originally published in
1968 by Thomas Nelson.
This edition sold for $2.10
at the time.When I said the
book was about
Middle Eastern
food, people looked
embarrassed, even
pitying. One said
“is it sheep’s eyes
and testicles?”In Egypt, women would never have given me their family
recipes, but in our new situation it was important and urgent
to share them. They were what we loved, a joint legacy of our
lost world. If we didn’t record them we would lose them forever.
In Egypt we were Europeanised – I spoke French at home
and Italian with our Slovene-Italian nanny, and I went to
the English School Cairo. But generations of my family had
lived for centuries in the Arab and Ottoman worlds and it was
their worlds, their loves and enthusiasms, that fascinated me.
I became an avid collector of recipes and stories. I hung around
carpet warehouses, embassies, and tourist offices to meet people
who could give me recipes. I also spent time reading up about
the Middle East.
When I asked a librarian at the British Library for help in
finding Arab cookbooks, he wrote down a list of publications- all were on medieval gastronomy, there was nothing
contemporary. There were translations of Arabic culinary
manuals found in Baghdad, Damascus and Andalusia. For
months I entertained friends with medieval banquets. Some
medieval dishes had similar names, similar combinations of
ingredients and flavourings, and similar techniques to those
I had been hearing from people leaving Egypt. I was enthralled.
I started looking for references to food in books about
the Middle East. Stuffed vine leaves were first mentioned in
ancient Persia, baklawa in Ottoman times. It was fascinating
to find elements from ancient Persia – meat cooked with fruit
for instance – in celebratory dishes across the Middle East,
especially in North Africa. Reading history made me understand
why dishes appeared in certain places. It was like putting the
pieces of a puzzle together.
When I decided, after a few years, to turn what I collected
into a book and told people, they said: “Why don’t you paint?”
When I said it was about Middle Eastern food they looked
embarrassed, even pitying. One said “is it sheep’s eyes and
testicles?” In the ’50s and ’60s food was not the hot topic
it is now. It was an embarrassing, taboo subject. And the
Middle East was hardly alluring. Much of it was what would
be described later in America as “the axis of evil”. I added
bits of stories as background in the hope that people would
want to try foods that came from a beautiful
civilization. It was often impossible to find
the ingredients I was writing about.
It’s amusing now to see how Middle
Eastern food has been adopted and developed
in the new vibrant food scene where cooking
is glamorous, chefs are venerated, cooking
competitions are among the most watched
television programs, and eating out is one
of the most popular leisure activities. Lebanese,
Turkish and Moroccan dishes feature in
modern British menus. Home cooks make
tagines and pilafs and know all about
pomegranate molasses, harissa, zahtar,
sumac and preserved lemons. Hummus is
to be found in the fridges of 41 per cent of
the population here in the UK, where I live.
In our new global
culinary culture where
chefs and food writers are
expected to be innovative
and original, to do their
own takes and tweaks, twists
and interpretations, Middle Eastern food is ever changing and
subject to trends and fashions. While ethnic restaurants
continue with their standard menus set in stone, eclectic chefs
play with ingredients and flavours. Some create fantastic dishes
and these are instantly copied. But you also get confusing
combinations, flavours that don’t go together, a mishmash that
looks beautiful in photos and on the plate, but doesn’t taste
good. When people travel to the Middle East in search of the
authentic traditional cuisines they are sometimes disappointed
not to find the stronger flavours and striking combinations that
have developed at home.
One example is dukkah and the story is Australian. Decades
ago I received a letter from Australia telling me that chefs and
artisanal producers were making their own versions of my recipe.
It gave me five different recipes. Later, when I attended a festival
in Australia I had a photo taken with a group of producers who
said they were inspired by my recipe. Now dukkah has become
a big artisanal product in Britain. British and American chefs
say they discovered dukkah in Australia.
But when writers have gone in search of dukkah in Egypt
they didn’t find it, and no one knew what they meant. The
reason is it is pronounced do’a. I got the spelling “dukkah”,
a transliteration of the classical Arabic word “to pound”, from
the 1860 edition of Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians
by Edward William Lane.
My recipe is one my mother got from Awad, our cook.
It has only hazelnuts, sesame, cumin and coriander seeds. Now
you find all kinds of combinations of seeds,
nuts and spices sold as Egyptian dukkah.
When I gave a seminar to the Egyptian Chefs
Association in Cairo a decade ago, I told
them they should be serving do’a in their
restaurants and producing it for export. I told
them that there were now many different
versions sold in the West and that people
there sprinkled it on foods and rubbed it
on chicken. They just laughed. ●PHOTOGRAPHY PAL HANSEN/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES (PORTRAIT) & ROB SHAW (BOOK)
GOURMET TRAVELLER 73