My lunch companion is a living institution. Self-taught cook, traveller, recipe collector, historian and anthropologist Claudia Roden has reshaped how we think about food, its cultural heritage and social meaning.
It’s not just celebrated chefs such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Moro’s Samantha Clark who pay tribute to her pioneering work. The historian Simon Schama once observed that “she is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Proust was a biscuit baker”.
Yet there is nothing grand or entitled about this remarkable 88-year-old. She has travelled to our meeting place in Hampstead on the tube, her preferred mode of transport, and speaks with scrupulous modesty, exceptional recall and a gift for anecdote that makes her a dream lunch partner.
La Cage Imaginaire, a small French-Italian brasserie in Flask Walk, is her chosen venue. It features in the latest Bridget Jones film, she tells me, as the scene of a romantic date. It’s a quiet Tuesday lunchtime and we are, at first, the only guests. Although she adores restaurants, she seldom eats out, she says, partly because of her age and partly because she enjoys cooking so much for family and friends. But she came here recently with one of her two daughters and was impressed by the quality of the food. “We should order quickly,” she says, “because they do everything from scratch.”
It’s wise advice, which neither of us takes, because as soon as we take our seats we slip into a conversation that scarcely takes a breather for the better part of the next three hours.
Roden’s first book, A Book of Middle Eastern Food, was published in the UK in the revolutionary year of 1968 (and four years later in the US). With crystalline prose and exotic recipes she summoned up both the food and the atmosphere of her childhood in Cairo, where she lived a privileged life in the city’s then thriving Jewish community. She grew up speaking French, Italian, English and Arabic, and became Egypt’s national backstroke swimming champion at 15. In the same year, she moved to boarding school in Paris, where her younger brother was being treated for a serious infection. She lived there for three years before moving to London. “I wanted to stay in Paris,” she recalls.
London was rather drab in 1954. Rationing only ended in the middle of that year, and British cuisine left something to be desired – taste, mostly. But she took to St Martin’s School of Art, enjoyed living with her two brothers in a flat in north London and began cooking for her fellow art students.
“They kept coming to dinner,” she explains. I bet they did.
We order two glasses of viognier. “For a while people would say they don’t want wine at lunchtime because it softens their brains,” she comments dryly.
She bought Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food when London became her home, and was pleased to find a recipe for molokhia, an Egyptian soup. “I learned how to use recipes,” she says, “because there hadn’t been recipes or cookbooks in Egypt. Everything was just handed down.”
In 1956, her parents, along with most of the remaining Jewish community, were forced to leave Egypt after the Suez crisis. They moved to London to join their children. Cut off from her homeland, Roden missed her extended family, but not so much that she wanted to marry one of them – her parents had tried to encourage her to make a match with a cousin. “There was the fear of you being on the shelf,” she says. Her mother and father both came from families with a large number of girls, who were seen as a burden because they required dowries. She says she tries to understand how her parents saw things but at the time she made it clear that she “didn’t appreciate that attitude”.
It’s time to order. The three-course set meal is enticingly priced and Roden opts for the duck and cognac mousse with ciabatta to start, followed by egg tagliatelle with king prawns and homemade green pesto topped with parmesan.
I go for the creamy wild mushroom risotto, then baked salmon with new potatoes, baby spinach and french beans in a white-wine butter sauce.
She was 23 when she married Paul Roden, a clothes importer, with whom she would have three children. The marriage ended after 15 years but in the middle of it she wrote A Book of Middle Eastern Food, a product of nostalgia, love of food and deep scholarship (she buried herself in the Soas library looking for clues to the origins of the meals she carefully documented).
Roden and her children formed a close bond during the years of single parenthood (her ex-husband relocated to the US), which remains strong – they all live near her home in Hampstead Garden Suburb and there are weekly meet-ups. When the children left home she decided to travel around Europe and the Middle East to research what would become The Book of Jewish Food (1997); the trip also provided material on Mediterranean cooking that resulted in a number of books and a BBC TV series.
She didn’t enjoy the process of being filmed or the demands to emote in an unnatural manner. “I looked so stupid, but also terrified,” she says. “I don’t wish television on anybody.”
Still in her forties, she did most of her travelling alone, which attracted a certain amount of unwanted male attention. Her ingenious method of dealing with it was by talking about her five grandchildren. “I didn’t have any then,” she says, “but after I said I did they were totally respectful, though one man said I shouldn’t mention my grandchildren because it puts men off!” It’s a typical Roden story: finely attuned to local cultures but not blind to their shortcomings.
The starters are generous, but Roden declares hers “good, though not quite as good as the first time”.
We discuss a paradox that runs deep in her books. The best traditional food is almost always the product of conflict, the clashing of cultures, the exchanging of culinary ideas and practices. But food is also, as the former war photographer and triple amputee Giles Duley says, the antithesis of war; a means of bringing people together.
“Yes,” she agrees, before adding, “I know Giles. He’s come to dinner at my place. He’s really wonderful. I can’t believe he can cook with one arm!” The longer we talk, the more I realise that she has met an awful lot of people down the years, but retains a youthful enthusiasm for the new and innovative.
Our main courses arrive as she talks about returning to Egypt for the first time, 30 years after her family were expelled. While her Jewish identity is important to her, the prawns confirm that she’s happily secular.
The return was “very, very emotional but also thrilling”, she says. A Book of Middle Eastern Food had helped Egyptian chefs rediscover their own cuisine and she drew crowds of fans and journalists wherever she went, all asking her why she left Egypt. “It’s not taught,” she says of the Jewish expulsion that took place across the Middle East.
Her instincts, though, are all about what unites people rather than what divides them, and she made a whole new group of friends on that first trip back with whom she remains in contact.
She’s currently working on another book, her 22nd, in which she revisits the Middle East but this time to explore the regional cooking and peasant food that has only recently begun to gain the appreciation it deserves.
“There’s more beans and vegetables. I’m not a vegetarian,” she quickly adds. “But let’s just say there’s more of that and the recipes are marvellous, because they taste so good.”
Her tagliatelle is also “very good”, though again not quite up there with her previous experience.
She says she’ll return to work after our lunch, although she worries – entirely without justification – about her writing. “You see,” she says, “I feel I’m lacking in words.”
I tell her that the past two and half hours strongly suggest otherwise.
We finish off with a couple of double espressos, before I accompany her back to the tube station. I could have happily stayed on until dinner. But this amazing cultural ambassador, this inspirational wandering gastrophile, has another book to write.
