Slow Food Fast

This week, after reading through Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food (Alfred Knopf, 2000) I decided it was so good I wanted to go ahead and buy a copy for myself. Another cookbook? These days I start my searches at the library rather than the bookstore, not only to save money but to save space for the ones I really want to use a lot.

Claudia Roden, "The New Book of Middle Eastern Food", Alfred Knopf, 2000

The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden (Alfred Knopf, 2000)

Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food was a big hit in 2000, a major revision and expansion of her first cookbook from 1968. She included new instructions for food processors and quicker and lower-fat cooking methods, and reintroduced the original authentic spices and other specialty ingredients for many dishes where she’d had to list Western substitutes 30 years earlier.

So why review it again? Ten years later, I find myself doing a thing I almost never do: reading the introduction. It’s an amazing piece of writing, and a full chapter in length. Roden combines scholarship and a look back at the history of the Middle East–politically and gastronomically–with personal notes about her Jewish family’s life in pre-revolutionary Cairo and their eventual exile to Europe. She also looks back at the younger, exuberantly naïve 20-something self who sought out authentic recipes for the original edition from relatives, restaurant chefs, farmers’ market vendors, street hawkers and private cooks of all kinds. In honor of her younger spirit, she decides to leave some of the earlier, more emotional writing in the revised edition rather than smoothing it all out.

But as a mature scholar, she delves into cooking techniques for the major classes of Arab, Turkish, Persian and North African food, the medieval sources of dishes that haven’t changed very much in centuries, and the trade routes and Crusader voyages that brought so much of Middle Eastern cooking back to Europe to be integrated into what we think of today as French.

The book itself is beautiful, with good photos but not that distracting excess of tabloid-sized food-glam that dominates today’s coffee table cookbooks. This is a working cookbook, sized right for the kitchen counter, with emphasis on the recipes.

Even though the basics are familiar by now, Roden includes enticing variations I haven’t run across elsewhere, and she makes them accessible and reader-friendly. While authentic technique and ingredients matter to her, Roden focuses on what counts most about these dishes to the people who make and eat them, and on the social experience of hosting guests and eating happily.

The recipes are generally simple, without huge laundry lists of ingredients or elaborate descriptions of technique. Roden groups  similar recipes like fillo appetizers or eggplant salads from different countries so you can see how each has migrated, and for dishes with a wide following (fava purée, grilled meat skewers) she provides regional and national variations on flavorings or dressings at the end of each recipe, where they’re most useful. Roden’s writing really comes through here as she explains the differences in a way that makes me want to run, not walk, to my fridge and then to my greengrocer so I can try out something new.

Folk tales, poems and memories of her childhood in Egypt appear between recipes and three insert sections of color photos are supplemented with black-and-white drawings for specific techniques such as folding fillo triangles. Even though I’ve done more than my share of folding fillo and may not be the right person to judge, I think in comparison with what I’ve seen elsewhere the drawings in Roden’s book manage to look very doable and kind of adventurous rather than intimidating for someone new to these techniques. My only complaint, really, is that she doesn’t use a microwave for any of it.

So I was looking forward to seeing the same generosity of spirit and depth of connection in her encyclopedic-rated The Book of Jewish Food, which came out in 1996, four years earlier. Rosh Hashanah is nearly upon us (Wednesday evening already) and I was eager to see what she had made of her ambition to cover Jewish food styles world-wide.

Roden was born into a wealthy Syrian Jewish merchant family in Cairo. They had servants, cooks, and cordial relations with local shopkeepers, spoke French and Italian in preference to Arabic, were “modern” (secular and didn’t keep kosher) and enjoyed a broad and lavish culinary repertoire. It did not all suddenly come to an end when Nasser threw the Jews out of Egypt in the 1950s–the family maintained its ties to other Egyptian and ex-Ottoman Jewish exiles in Paris and London, and they seemed to thrive.

Eventually, Roden shocked her family by marrying an Ashkenazi Jew, because her well-heeled family had always considered Ashkenazim beneath contempt–provincial, downtrodden, poor, too religious, pathetically lousy cooks, with women who were too loose or who–gasp–worked, and otherwise socially inferior. And that’s where things start to unravel in this book. Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, history | Tagged: Claudia Roden, Jewish cookbooks, Middle Eastern food, Moroccan cooking, Sephardic recipes | Comments Off on Roden, with Reservations