THE ORIGINAL TASTE MAKER

It’s 50 years since Claudia Roden first championed Middle Eastern cuisine and transformed British tastes for ever – and her passion for good cooking burns as brightly as ever, as Felicity Cloake discovers

Claudia Roden helped us fall in love with Middle Eastern food

Whoever said you should never meet your heroes has clearly never been to tea with Claudia Roden. We’re sitting at the Egyptian-born cookery writer’s kitchen table in North London separated by a shallow, conker-coloured cake elegantly dusted with icing sugar. Orange and walnut, she says, cutting us both a slice. It’s from her new book Med, a love letter to the culture that shaped her. My gift of an Ottolenghi pistachio, polenta and lemon loaf suddenly looks rather overdressed in comparison.

An impulse purchase en route, it was a nod to the fact that, like Nigella Lawson, Jay Rayner and countless others, the British-israeli chef is a huge Roden fan: he once described her as ‘what every cookery writer wants to be’. Indeed, when Yotam Ottolenghi first came to London as a culinary student in the late 1990s and was asked by friends and colleagues for recipes from home, he’d share some from her groundbreaking A Book Of Middle Eastern Food – which, Claudia proudly notes, was published in 1968, the year he was born.

Before Claudia, most Britons thought hummus was a layer of soil, not a dish! Now, of course, you can buy it everywhere. When we meet, she’s fresh from a holiday on Devon’s tiny Lundy Island with her children and grandchildren. ‘There in the little shop was hummus, and they also had halloumi – we just couldn’t believe it,’ she says gleefully.

Claudia remembers trying to accommodate the tastes of friends she met at her British school in Egypt in the 1940s. ‘When I had birthday parties, I would tell my mother, please, just jelly, just scones… nothing at all that we do because they won’t like it.’ Yet even the British school dinners as interpreted by local cooks didn’t prepare her for the reality of food in London when she first arrived here in the mid 1950s, just after the end of rationing. ‘Horrible,’ she says matter-of-factly, ‘but we all know it was at that time.’ The memory of the vegetables in particular makes her shudder: ‘They were done very badly.’

If cooking in this country has come a long way, so has Claudia Roden. Born into a vast extended Jewish family in cosmopolitan pre-war Cairo, with one Turkish and three Syrian grandparents, she grew up speaking French and Italian at home and English at school. Free time was spent at the

I just want to entertain my friends, to cook what gives us the most pleasure

‘very English’ country club (she is, I discover, a former Egyptian backstroke champion), and holidays on the Mediterranean coast; but once she hit adolescence, the pressure was on to marry.

When she was 15, at boarding school in Paris and hanging out at the same Latin Quarter cafes as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-paul Sartre, an older cousin came to visit. Claudia told him ‘all my beliefs: that I didn't believe in God, and I was against capitalism, because I had been influenced by other cousins who were communists.’ He was shocked, warning her she’d be ‘struck down dead’ for even saying such things.

That said, he was not too shocked to then ask her parents for her hand in marriage on his return, and an engagement party was held in her absence. ‘I was brought up to respect my parents… and in some way, I was flattered that somebody wanted to marry me. And, you know, I heard that he had a yacht,’ she admits. ‘People say you’re such a strong, tough person, how could you have accepted? But I wanted to be a dutiful daughter.’ Only the intervention of the French headmistress saved her from the marriage actually happening.

Instead, she moved to London to study art at Saint Martins, but her newfound and much relished freedom was soon curtailed by the sudden arrival of her parents, who had to leave Cairo in a hurry during the Suez Crisis. Back under the same roof, her father was keen to see her finally settled. ‘He said, “Everybody in Egypt wanted to marry you when you were 15. But now everybody is thinking, what is wrong with you? I was really shocked, thinking that at 19 people don’t want you any more.”’

Eventually, at the grand old age of 22, she met Paul Roden – a chance encounter at a cafe near where she worked. They shared a table and, a year later, they were married.

PRESERVING A CULTURE

The family’s forced removal to London did, however, change the young Claudia’s mind about one thing. ‘When you don’t think you’ll ever see your country again…’ she pauses. ‘I at once felt a great nostalgia.’ With the community scattered, her mother, without a cook for the first time in her life, threw herself, with the help of her daughter, into recreating the tastes of home for her beloved husband. They wrote to Muslim

friends back in Cairo begging them to send recipe books, but the only thing available was an Arabic translation of a catering manual left behind by the British Army containing such military favourites as macaroni cheese and jam roly-poly. The British Library, meanwhile, yielded nothing newer than the 13th century.

They had more luck with fellow exiles passing through London, who would come to the house for Friday-night dinner, sometimes even sleeping on the floor until they found somewhere else to go. ‘In Egypt, nobody would ever give away a recipe, only to their daughter, not even to their daughter-in-law probably, but people were desperate. “Please give me your recipe, and I’ll remember you by it; I might never see you again.” There was this sense that we weren’t just losing our home and our whole world, but all the people we had been close to as well.’

Initially she was motivated to record the recipes simply to preserve a culture that was in danger of being lost for ever. ‘It felt important that I write it down, for us. I never thought anybody would want those books,’ she says, adding the prevailing view at the time was that Arab cooking was all ‘eyeballs and testicles’. Courgettes didn’t exist, and none of her British friends had ever so much as cooked an aubergine.

TASTES OF HOME

The prompt to make the collection more comprehensive with a view to publication came from Elizabeth David, whose A Book Of Mediterranean Food was the first cookbook she owned. ‘Hang on, you knew Elizabeth David?’ I interrupt. Oh yes, Claudia says, waving a hand airily towards the dining room. ‘She came for dinner here.’ I am, momentarily, silenced as she describes writing hundreds of letters to cousins and friends of friends now dispersed all over the world, begging for their best recipes. These dishes, often passed down from mothers and grandmothers, were these women’s ‘roots, their identity, their culture,’ she says. ‘They were filled with emotional baggage… because they had been thrown out of their lives.’

Once in print they took on a life of their own: I came across one of my favourite cakes, a sticky orange and almond affair, on a supermarket recipe card in the late 1990s, but I now know it was almost certainly inspired by the Judeo-spanish version in A Book Of Middle Eastern Food, which came to Claudia via Iris Galante, her brother’s first wife’s Syrian grandmother.

Ever generous, she says she feels ‘honoured’ when she sees a new interpretation of one of her recipes – ‘I feel these echoes… it’s thrilling. I feel that with Yotam, always’ – even if, having been gifted these precious family heirlooms, she herself finds it hard to meddle with tradition. Outside the kitchen, however, I get the sense her life has been one long, joyous bid for freedom: from the gilded cage of her childhood, from her father’s old-fashioned ideas, from the expectation that, when her marriage broke up, leaving her on her own with three school-age children, she would find herself a nice Jewish divorcé. ‘I just said no, we’re going to have the time of our lives. We are going to be happy as a family with one parent.’

When the children eventually left home in the early 1980s, she did too, charming her way into kitchens across southern Europe and the Middle East in search of yet more recipes for a BBC television series on the Mediterranean, and a succession of national newspaper columns. Proud though they were of her achievements, her parents found it hard to accept her travelling alone: still worried, she says, that ‘I might shame them by having an affair’.

That she went ahead and travelled anyway, publishing award-winning books on, among other things, Italian, Spanish and Levantine foods, as well as, in 1996, the seminal work on Jewish cookery The Book of Jewish Food, says a lot about what Claudia Roden has made of a life that could easily have turned out very differently. Rather than dwelling on what she lost all those years ago, she chooses to view starting again in London as an opportunity to be seized with both hands. ‘We’re independent, and we are who we are, and we can do what we want,’ she says cheerfully. ‘This new world is an amazing place and I’m happy to be in it.’

And what she still wants most of all, it seems, is to cook for people: ‘It’s my way of keeping in touch,’ she explains. ‘At 80, you have to make an effort and I enjoy people coming to dinner more than going to the theatre or cinema. I just want to entertain my friends; to cook what gives us the most pleasure. I’ve learned a lot from Yotam and the others about being free that way.’

Med, her first book in a decade, was born out of this desire, a collaboration between Claudia and the friends and family who gathered at her kitchen table to share the fruits of half a century of gastronomic scholarship. ‘That is what I like most and that’s what this book is,’ she says. A celebration of Mediterranean flavours yes, but, more importantly, a celebration of Mediterranean warmth and hospitality. And most of all, a celebration of Claudia Roden herself.

Courgettes didn’t exist, and none of my British friends had ever so much as cooked an aubergine