Claudia Roden’s Book of Middle Eastern Food is as much an evocative set of stories as a list of great recipes. Yotam Ottolenghi introduces the cookbook that never fails to inspire him
A Book of Middle Eastern Food was published in 1968, the year of my birth, yet I have only started using it in the past decade, 40 years on, when I began writing about food. I say use because this is what I do with Claudia Roden’s books. I use them. Beyond the evocative stories and buoyant style, beyond the comprehensive list of dishes and unfailing set of instructions – there is always information, hard information, meticulously collected, compellingly assembled, lovingly told. It is these reliable and interconnected facts – covering history, geography and ethnography – that draw me to all of her work. I can rely on them as references in my own writing and they never fail to inspire me to create.
You would naturally think, then, that there is some sort of irony in Claudia’s assertion in the introduction to the1985 extended edition of this book, titled A New Book of Middle Eastern Food, that “this is not a scholarly book”, even perhaps a bit of false modesty. Well, not an iota of either.
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