In 2007, a US magazine sent a photographer to shoot a portrait of Claudia Roden at her home in Hampstead Garden Suburb, north London. The photographer looked around, kept his camera in his bag and turned to Roden: "You have a shitty kitchen to photograph." He took her instead to a studio and posed her with a rather majestic goat.
Roden's kitchen has not changed much since 2007, and in fact it's scarcely different from when she moved into the house in the early 1970s. The hob has seen better days, the ancient Portuguese tiles are fading and a medal from the James Beard awards is slung casually over a cupboard door. The kitchen is cramped, but the 77-year-old Roden long ago sprawled into two larders for ingredients and on to a long wooden table where she does most of the chopping and writes her indispensable cookbooks, which painstakingly document the cuisines of the Middle East, Italy, Spain and beyond.
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