The recipes she has collected for nearly 60 years have inspired today’s chefs and brought a world of new flavours into our homes
Someone once told Claudia Roden that she couldn’t write about Jewish food because there was no such thing. Her response, in 1999’s The Book of Jewish Food, was to declare that, “because a culture is complex does not mean it does not exist”. This phrase could sum up Roden’s extraordinary life’s work. For more than five decades she has devoted herself to the task of piecing together complex food cultures and proving that they not only exist, they must also be shared. It’s largely thanks to her that ingredients such as tahini and couscous have become British staples. To appreciate how much we owe Claudia Roden, consider the fact that when she was writing her first masterpiece, A Book of Middle Eastern Food, in the 1960s, she was told by many British people that she would have nothing to write about because Middle Eastern food was all “sheep’s eyes and testicles”.
I do look things up online, but I have to say, a lot of the food on the internet is from my books
Related: OFM’s classic cookbooks: Claudia Roden’s Book of Middle Eastern Food
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