Paper Trail

In 1968 Claudia Roden published A Book of Middle Eastern Food. The defining 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 takes us back to when she first put pen to paper.

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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.