Claudia Roden.

Claudia Roden: interview | Life and style | The Observer: "Claudia Roden: 'Spain's regional dishes are memories, and people want to hold on to them'"

For many years, Claudia Roden resisted Spain with all her might. "Yes," she says, with a sheepish smile. "First of all, I wouldn't go because of Franco. Then, I will be honest, it was the tourist thing." It was only when her American editor asked her to write about the food of the country – a suggestion this editor cannily followed by saying she would ask a certain other cookery writer were Roden to turn her down – that she finally gave in. Ever since, it has been love all the way. Her capacious new book, The Food of Spain, took five years to complete, and every day was replete with discovery. "What is exciting for me is that Spain hasn't lost its regional dishes," she says. "Until the 1950s, 80% of the population lived in the country. So there are memories, and people want to hold on to them. The Catalan institute of gastronomy sent me its entire archive. There were 900 recipes, and that's only one region."

The Food of Spain
by Claudia Roden


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Roden gets up from the table – we are in what she calls "my 70s kitchen", the heart of her picture-postcard Arts and Crafts house in London's Hampstead Garden Suburb – and heads for the stove, on top of which is an enormous pot. She peers into it, and then begins stirring, the movement slow and careful. On the telephone, she warned me that she wouldn't be able to feed me today; she would only just have returned from a speaking engagement in the Netherlands, and the cupboard would be bare. But this has turned out, as I had a hunch that it would, not to be entirely true. On the table are smoked salmon and toasted challah, and some Dutch almond tarts she wants me to try, and in the pot is a dish from Asturias called crema de manzana, or apple cream . "Usually, this is eaten cold," she says. "The top is caramelised, like a crème brûlée. But it is cold today, so we will eat it warm."

She tips a little of the crema into a shallow dish, and places it in front of me, together with a spoon. It looks just like scrambled egg. How does it taste? Like nothing I have tasted before. The sweet-sharpness of apple has been – how? – seamlessly combined with the enveloping richness of Jersey cream so that it is impossible to tell where one flavour begins and the other ends. The texture is light and silky. Roden, a smiley, warm person with extraordinarily almond eyes, gives me a look. "It's very comforting, isn't it?" she says, beginning on her own dish. Crema de manzana is one of several recipes from the book that has entered her day-to-day repertoire. Among the others are pollo con manzanas y uvas (chicken with grapes and apples, another dish from Asturias), arroz con setas (a homely rice with mushroom dish much loved in Catalonia and Valencia) and tarta de Santiago, the almond cake named for St James, whose relics are believed to be buried in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.

Predictably, Roden has a theory about tarta de Santiago: she believes that it was originally a Jewish passover cake whose recipe lived on thanks to the conversos (Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity, usually under pressure) and, of course, this makes sense when you consider the Sephardic cakes of almond and orange she championed in A Book of Middle Eastern Food. In Spain, she says, some people are beginning to celebrate their Jewish heritage after years of denial. "I went to stay at a convent where I was visiting an 85-year-old nun who I'd been told had many great recipes – and, by the way, it was true: she gave me 40. But the amazing thing was when we went to Seville cathedral together. In a side chapel, she pointed out the name of the family on her mother's side who'd built it, and it was clear they were converts from Judaism."

Others, however, remain defensive – particularly when it comes to the Arab conquest of Spain. "In Alicante, an upper-class woman said to me: Claudia, you have to realise that we are of Roman and Visigoth stock. It infuriated her that foreigners always noticed Moorish influences. She urged me to see the Roman aqueduct in Segovia. I thought it was a little ridiculous: the Romans were in Jordan and Egypt, too, after all. Some people just want to negate the Muslims, who were supposed to have left in 1492, but many of whom, just like the Jews, simply converted."

Roden, though, has a nose for these things: deny your roots in her presence at your peril. It's not only that she spent so long travelling the world in search of Jews when she was researching her encyclopedic The Book of Jewish Food. As she is an Egyptian Jew, Spain's past is her present, and always has been. As a girl in Cairo, for instance, she knew old women who gossiped in Ladino, the Hebrew-Castilian language of the Spanish Jews at the time of the Expulsion of 1492. "At Goizeko, a smart restaurant in Madrid, I knew the chef was going to be from a converso family before I had even met him – and sure enough, I was right." How did she know? She shrugs. "His name. Santos. The same as a friend of mine, a Portuguese Jew. And the menu. He does Basque haute cuisine, but his influences are also Castilian – lots of game – and Jewish and Muslim."

All families have their hidden histories. The other day, she heard from someone in Israel who is doing research on her great-grandfather, who was the chief rabbi of Aleppo, Syria, during the final years of Ottoman rule. "He told me that one of my great-grandfather's sons – there were supposed to have been 26 children – went from being Mordechai Douek to Mohammed Douek." A tiny pause. "And you know, there is a Hamas leader called Douek." She laughs. "Perhaps I should go and root him out!"

Claudia Roden's career in food writing began, though she did not know it at the time, in 1953. She was then a schoolgirl in Paris (she was sent there at 15, French being the language of choice for the Cairene bourgeoisie). Every Sunday, she and her brothers and a cousin were invited to eat ful medames – the purée of brown beans that is the Egyptian national dish – at the home of relatives. In Egypt, ful is considered a poor man's treat but, as Roden wrote in the introduction to A Book of Middle Eastern Food when it was published in 1968, in Paris these rather boring beans became invested "with all the glories and warmth of Cairo, our home town, and the embodiment of all that for which we were homesick". The lesson– it has stayed with her ever since – was that the taste of a stew, or a soup, or crushed brown beans, contains not just its ingredients but a whole world of history, culture and, above all, stories.

On her travels, she asks every person she meets for their favourite recipe, and then follows this inquiry up with a host of other questions. "I ask them where their parents were from, and their grandparents, and how they lived. I want to build up a picture. I want to get into people's lives." As Simon Schama once put it: "Claudia Roden is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Proust was a biscuit baker."

Both her parents came from old Syrian Jewish merchant families who had moved to Cairo in the 1890s, on the trail of the cotton trade opened with the Suez canal. The Cairo of her childhood, for all that she has a tendency to romanticise it, was a place where everyone – Arabs, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Copts and Jews – lived more or less in harmony. "There were all these communities and at school you said your religion with total joy." Then, in 1956, the Suez crisis happened and President Nasser, having seized the canal, began expelling Jews and foreigners. Her parents, Nelly and Cesar, followed their daughter to London, where she was by now living. The family settled in Golders Green. Roden did not return to Cairo for 30 years. Her parents never went back. "They thought it would hurt too much."

Roden had arrived in London before rationing ended, which was grim. "False cream, false everything. It was a shock. Is that what people eat?" But this was nothing compared to the trauma her parents suffered a couple of years later. "My father was a happy man. He made the best of it. But my mother never recovered really. They missed the big extended family. Suddenly, there was just me and my two brothers." Has her own homesickness ever gone away? A Book of Middle Eastern Food has always seemed to me to be one of the greatest literary expressions of homesickness ever written. But it is also more than 40 years old. "I can't say I'm homesick, exactly. I don't feel I'm British, though I'm hugely happy here, and my own children are completely British. My son got very angry when I went on Desert Island Discs and I chose Edith Piaf, and no Beatles, and I have a granddaughter who was an Arsenal mascot. But neither do I feel Egyptian, or French."

London in the 50s meant freedom for Roden – at least at first. "In Egypt, I was bored to death of society. Women, except for the very poor Jews, didn't work. I didn't know a single one who did. The women played cards and did petit point and gossiped. They talked endlessly about each other. They didn't even read a newspaper." In London, she became a Marxist, joined the New Left Club, and enrolled at St Martins School of Art. She wanted to be a muralist, or a film-maker. Only then her parents arrived, and suddenly she was under their jurisdiction again. When she took a job at the Alitalia office in Piccadilly, they were horrified, for all that the family needed the money. "For my father, it was total shame for a woman to be earning money. He didn't want anyone to see me. I used to have to hide behind the desk if I saw someone I knew. When my book [Middle Eastern Food] became a success, he was proud, but he was also very keen to tell people that I certainly hadn't written it for the money."

On Friday nights, the Douek house would fill with people – whoever happened to be passing through. In the kitchen, the women would cook and gossip, and Roden would listen. She was struck that almost the first question they would ask one another was: what recipes do you have? Food, the taste of home, was the only thing most of them had managed to bring to Europe. The servants were gone, and the rugs, and the intricately carved tables. But not the dfeena, the kibbeh, or the konafa. "People were obsessed by food when they came out." Somewhat to her surprise, she began writing down the recipes. "I didn't want us to lose them."

In 1959, she married Paul Roden, a businessman from a family of Russian Jewish immigrants. At last she had her own kitchen and, for the next decade or so, while her three children were small, she practised the recipes she had gathered, and looked around for more. When the British Library failed to come up with the goods, she went to the Middle Eastern embassies in London and quizzed those in the visa queue, or to carpet warehouses, where the workers were from Iraq. She insists that a part of her still feels like an imposter in the world of scholarship, in spite of all the awards she has won, in spite of the term she spent at Yale as a visiting fellow. But this is rubbish: she turned out to be a natural researcher. She even tried recipes from the Iraqi Kitab al-Tabikh, and the Syrian Kitab al Wusla il al Habib fi Wasfi t-Tayyabti wat-Tib, both of which are 13th century, and the best of these made their way into her own Book of Middle Eastern Food.

Finally, there seemed nothing left to do but write, and so that is what she did, her recipes punctuated by her own memories and swoony Arabic fables. At first, the book sold entirely by word of mouth, but so quickly that it was eventually bought by Penguin, at which point the paperback became a huge hit and hummus bi tahina began its slow but steady journey to becoming another of our national dishes.

Roden's marriage lasted 15 years, and when it ended she became a single mother. She survived by giving cookery classes at home and, eventually, by writing more books: The Food of Spain is her 11th. But it is still A Book of Middle Eastern Food that most British people think of when they hear her name. Like Elizabeth David's Mediterranean Food two decades before it, A Book of Middle Eastern Food changed the way a certain section of British society ate, for ever. Our supermarkets' rabid devotion to hummus must surely be laid at her door. "Yes," she says. "I know it is all down to me because, many years ago, Marks & Spencer called me in to advise them, and to taste their hummus and filo parcels, and when I got there, my book was the only one I saw. When they started selling stuffed vine leaves, the packet read word for word the same as my book." Right now, she tells me, two separate documentary teams are working on hummus – the controversy centres, on whether the dish is Jewish or Arab – and both have already beaten a path to her door.

These days, she is still working as hard as ever. Next up is a new edition of her book about Italian food. When she is in London, she eats at home mostly, and she shops, at the Hormuz grocery store on Finchley Road, where she can even buy melokhia, the spinach-like leaves that are used to make a soup Roden is convinced no one but an Egyptian could ever truly love (melokhia has even been found in the stomachs of Egyptian mummies).

But she travels a lot, including to Cairo. "The first time I went back it was very emotional. I was looking up at all the windows, wondering if I would recognise a face. I went looking for a little synagogue there used to be in the garden of somebody wealthy. It was still there, even if it was broken down. I must say that the Jews who did stay were not persecuted." The country's so-called revolution has left her sad and afraid. "At first, I was full of joy. Now I'm not. I'm an optimist, but I worry about extremism, even though I can't imagine Egyptians ever settling for that."

It's almost dark now, and our Earl Grey tea is drunk. In a few hours, there will, or so we have been told, be heavy snow. I had better go. Is there time, I wonder, to make a detour via Edgware Road? Talking to Roden has made me long for some freshly fried kibbeh – the torpedoes of spiced lamb, cracked wheat and pine nuts that are the national dish of Syria and Lebanon – and they are difficult-verging-on-impossible to make at home. In the end, I don't risk it, but later that night, as the fat flakes fall, I read the section on kibbeh in the copy of Middle Eastern Food she signed for me. It's nearly as good as eating one. "I know of no other dish whose preparation is enveloped by such a mystique," she writes. "Some women are known to have a 'special hand' or 'finger' for making kibbeh… One is said to be favoured by the gods if one is born with a long finger, which makes the shaping of kibbeh easier." On and on she goes, weaving her spell. The recipes, when eventually she gets to them, feel almost like an interruption.

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