“We all felt a very strong need to collect, to record,” Ms. Roden took notes, detailing regional pilaf variations and each cook’s method of layering onions, tomatoes and pita bread into fattoush. They shared the secrets to their dishes so that when any one of them prepared that rich orange-almond cake or a mint-sprinkled tahini salad, they would remember one another and feel loved and understood. Roden heard the women ask the same question - “Do you have any recipes?” - every time a cousin or friend would arrive. Roden married Paul Roden when she was 22 the couple had three children before separating in 1974.) And women were freer to choose their husbands. The exchange of recipes became a currency, a way of communicating and expressing love. Roden absorbed and which helped her research and write “ The Food of Spain,” published in 2011. Her maternal grandmother, who could trace her ancestry back to pre-Inquisition Spain, spoke Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), which Ms. Roden’s first language was French (as it was for all cosmopolitan Jews in Cairo), followed by Italian (the language of her beloved nanny), English and Arabic. This was when the Egyptian capital supplanted Aleppo as the region’s mercantile center after the opening of the Suez Canal.Ĭairo had a diverse, polyglot culture. Memories of CairoĬlaudia Douek was born in 1936 to a large, prominent Syrian Jewish family, who had emigrated to Cairo in the 19th century. By that time, her family had long been expelled from Egypt, and her childhood home was gone. That’s when she left for boarding school in Paris, and didn’t return until a quarter-century later. “When the book came out, people would always ask me if all the recipes were for testicles and eyeballs.”Īt the border of the lawn stood a hedgerow of scarlet-blossomed fuchsia trees reminiscent of the florescent bougainvillea on her family’s terrace in Cairo, where she lived until she was 15. Roden, who identifies as a Sephardi/Mizrahi Jew (Mizrahi is the Israeli term for Jews from the Middle East and North Africa). “At that moment, no one was interested in the food of the enemy culture,” said Ms. Roden’s book was all but ignored when it came out, on the heels of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, in which Britain supported Israel. “‘A Book of Middle Eastern Food’ has been around for so long it feels like prehistory,” he said, adding, “it was really revelatory for its time.”Īlthough it’s hard to imagine, in the midst of Britain’s current love affair with Middle Eastern flavors, that the cuisine was considered outlandish and unappealing in the 1960s. Roden with laying the foundation for chefs like him.
Yotam Ottolenghi, the chef, cookbook author and New York Times food columnist,credits Ms. Roden’s work that took on the entire cuisine of the Middle East in depth, in ways both scholarly and highly personal. David had already published a handful of Middle Eastern recipes - notably, hummus bi tahina - in her far-ranging “ A Book of Mediterranean Food” in 1950. Roden started writing “A Book of Middle Eastern Food,” Ms. Still, this preparation of meat is different and unfamiliar to most of us, and as such won't appeal to everyone - as it did not with my mother.When Ms. I found they're not as good on their own, however, as they are tucked in a pita or flatbread with some fresh greens and tzatziki sauce (thinly sliced tomato and red onion would have been very good with this too - wish I would have thought of that BEFORE we sat down to dinner) I made them into little sausage shapes, two per skewer, then turned them over to Hubs, who grilled them to perfection over charcoal. I was so pleased, so surprised! Somehow the myriad of spices all come together and produce something pleasantly and mildly flavorful, albeit unusually so. But I was eager to try this, and figured if worse came to worst we could always come up with Plan B. (I know, where have I been all my life?) I wasn't sure at all that I'd like all the spices, many of which were common to a pumpkin pie! I was particularly wary of the cinnamon and was tempted to cut it way back. I planned this around an entire Middle Eastern dinner! I have never had anything like this. Bored with the same ol' same ol,' I decided to throw caution to the wind and go for something completely foreign to me.
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