FOOD: When her family was forced to leave Egypt, the food writer Claudia Roden began collecting recipes as a way of keeping people together, she tells Nuala Haughey
If you have a Claudia Roden cookery book on your shelves, the odds are that it is one of the best-thumbed in your collection, its pages stained with spurts of lemon juice and blotches of tomato sauce. When your cupboards are empty except for bags of chickpeas, bulgar, couscous and lentils, you know that Roden's recipes from the Mediterranean and Middle East will inspire you.
A masterful food writer, she has been collecting recipes for more than half a century. Her books contain more than just instructions on how to prepare dishes; they are food-infused travelogues, seasoned with history and ethnography, and often laced with personal stories and interesting anecdotes. Her polymathic approach to her craft - the historian Simon Schama has said she is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Proust was a biscuit baker - is an antidote to food as fashion and chefs as showbiz.
In person, as in her books, the 68-year-old wears her erudition lightly. We meet in Jerusalem, where she is speaking at a conference on Mediterranean food and the culture, history and art associated with it. Elegantly dressed and charmingly polite, she speaks with crisp English diction, and only a soupcon of an accent hints at her upbringing in a French-speaking Jewish merchant family in Cairo. Even when she praises a dish as fabulous, it is with the refined enthusiasm of an era before the phrase "pukka tucker" entered our food lexicon.
Roden's classic A Book of Middle Eastern Food was first published 37 years ago. It was a time when courgettes and aubergines were still considered exotic in her adopted home of London; people would ask if the food was all about sheep's eyeballs and testicles. Now couscous and tabbouleh are staples of serious restaurants. "When I started writing, people were disgusted with the idea of Middle Eastern food, because, as colonials, they didn't want to eat local food," she says. "It was the food of the barefoot Arabs in the desert. And I thought, why should they want to eat any of these things without a story, a poem, a proverb?"
Roden's childhood memories of Cairo are infused with the aromas of sizzling garlic, crushed coriander seeds, rose water, orange blossom and mint. Her family was forced to leave Egypt after the Suez War in 1956, when thousands of Jews were expelled and their property confiscated.
Roden was studying art in London at the time. She says her route to food writing was a gathering-in of recipes and stories in a bid to document the largely oral tradition of cooking in the region. "It was also a question of nostalgia, a way of keeping together, because people had spread out, and I would ask them to send me recipes."
Her primary concern in the early days was the preservation of a culture. "I never cared about what people wanted to cook. I only started caring when I started teaching cooking in my house, and all these people had blank faces when I showed them how to make kibbeh." Kibbeh, also known as kubba or kobeba, are dumplings eaten throughout the Middle East; they are made by laboriously pounding meat and cracked wheat, and shaping the mixture into balls, which are then stuffed. Roden acknowledges that kibbeh will one day be a dish that only chefs will take time to prepare.
Today she prefers recipes that she knows her three children and their friends, who work and have young families, have time to cook. She believes that the role food plays in binding families together is evaporating. "We are in a global age when recipes are no longer passed through families but are from the TV or the internet," she says. "People don't know where recipes come from or if there's a story behind them."
Roden's latest book, Arabesque, involved the author in fresh travels in Lebanon, Morocco and Turkey. "People told me you can't find any new things, but actually it's sort of endless, because there are versions of versions in each town, especially in Morocco, where I came across dishes I hadn't heard of."
Roden, who has written more than half a dozen acclaimed books and presented a BBC series on Mediterranean cooking, has been described as the last of the scholar-cooks in the tradition of Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. She is critical of the faddish world of celebrity chefs and kitchens as arenas of television entertainment, but she is also typically measured. "There's a good side and a bad side. I admire Jamie Oliver. His enthusiasm, his bubbling over. He has created a revolution in cooking. He has helped young men who want to cook and young people who want to be chefs. He's brought a lot to the profession and the home, and he's a good cook with good taste."
Although a Turkey Twizzler would never pass her lips - "I'm afraid to eat one" - and she would rather go without food during the day than eat something bad, Roden is not a food snob. Someone remarked to her recently what a faux pas it had been to be served pesto at a dinner party, as it was so passé. "Out of date?" she says, exercised by a notion she believes comes from the US. "How can anything be out of date? Pesto is wonderful. For food to become a question of fashion is a big mistake, but it's all to do with people wanting to be 'in'."
Roden is now co-researching a book on Spanish regional food. To prepare for her Iberian travels, she read Don Quixote, which describes the protagonist as the kind of man to eat lentil soup on Fridays and an occasional pigeon as an extra delicacy on Sundays. "People still eat lentil soup and pigeon in La Mancha," she says, pleased to discover that the culinary tradition has endured for more than 400 years.
So what about the famous Madrid tapas dish of crispy pigs' ears? "I asked the US publisher about that, because we didn't know if we could include it," she says. She arches a fine eyebrow and smiles. "As it happens, pigs' ears are fashionable in America at the moment."
Arabesque: Sumptuous Food from Morocco, Turkey and Lebanan is due to be published by Michael Joseph in October, £25
RECIPES
ORANGE CAKE
Serves 12 or more
This is a Sephardic Passover cake that Roden learned to make from her sister-in-law's grandmother, who was from Aleppo, in Syria. Today it is ubiquitous; Nigella Lawson makes it with clementines. Roden says if you can't find orange-blossom water, you can leave it out.
2 oranges
6 eggs
250g sugar
2 tbsp orange-blossom water
1 tsp baking powder
250g blanched almonds, coarsely ground
Wash the oranges and boil them whole for 90 minutes, or until they are very soft. Beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the orange-blossom water, baking powder and almonds, then mix well. Cut open the oranges, remove the seeds, and puree the fruit in a food processor. Mix thoroughly with the egg and almond mixture and pour into a 23-centimetre oiled cake tin - preferably non-stick with a removable base - dusted with matzo meal or flour. Bake in a preheated oven at 190 degrees/ gas five for an hour. Let it cool before turning it out.
AUBERGINE FLAN
Serves 8
This is a popular Jewish dish from Turkey. A similar dish is mentioned in the records of the Court of Inquisition in Spain as one that gave away Christian converts still attached to their Jewish faith. Roden says she would now use less feta than this recipe stipulates.
1.75kg aubergines
250g feta cheese
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 large slices good white bread, crusts removed
100g grated kashkaval or Gruyère
5 tbsp sunflower oil
Roast and peel the aubergines. Put them in a colander and press with your hand to squeeze out as much of the juices as you can. Then chop the flesh with two knives or, as is also the custom in Turkey, mash it with a wooden spoon. Do not use a food processor - that would change the texture.
In a bowl, mash the feta with a fork. Add the eggs, the bread (soaked in water and squeezed dry), the kashkaval or Gruyère (reserving two or three tablespoons) and four tablespoons of oil. Beat well. Add the aubergines and mixwell. Pour the mixture into an oiled baking dish, sprinkle with a tablespoon of oil and the remaining grated cheese, then bake at 180 degrees/ gas four for about an hour, until lightly coloured.
From The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the Present Day, by Claudia Roden, published by Penguin, £15.99