"claudia roden" news and stories

At the James Beard Awards this week, cookbook author Claudia Roden received the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award: She was inducted into the Cookbook Hall of Fame for her landmark tome, "A Book of Middle Eastern Food," first published in 1972. Roden, who lives in London, was in Manhattan to accept the award, and spoke to Slashfood.

Where does your love of Middle Eastern food come from?
CR: I come from Egypt. When I lived there, it was a very cosmopolitan country, like Dubai today. People from all around the area came there for business. When the Suez Canal crisis happened, it resulted in Jews having to leave Egypt. This whole big shock of having to leave brought to me the urgency of collecting recipes because we never had a cookbook. There were never any recipes in print at all. It didn't exist.

More with Claudia Roden after the jump ...

When the words "flourless" and "cake" are put into the same sentence, the word that comes between them is almost always "chocolate." That is not the case here and this Flourless Orange Cake from Kuidaore is good enough to win over even dedicated chocoholics. The Sephardic recipe was first printed in Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern Food, and though the origins of the cake are older than the book, the innovative use of the orange to Western palates made it a hit. Though it is not in the new edition, the recipe is well-known enough to appear in many other publications. The cake is made with whole, boiled oranges, ground almonds, sugar, eggs and baking powder - that's it. Mix it, bake it and with very minimal effort, you'll have a moist and tender cake that melts in your mouth, leaving a flavor that makes even the common orange seem exotic.

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When Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern Food was first published more than 30 years ago, it set a standard for Middle Eastern cuisine in the US. The foods of Morocco, Turkey and most Arabian countries were almost entirely unknown. As the tastes of American chefs grew to love and crave new flavors, Roden updated her book into The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. This volume contains most of the recipes set forth in the original, as well as many new ones. The recipes are divided by type and main ingredient, so there are chapters dedicated to soups, yogurt, meat dishes and vegetables, though there is a lot of crossover between the sections as some ingredients, like yogurt, are widely used. Roden's presentation of the material is very interesting, as she takes the time to explain a lot of the origins of dishes and ingredients and the lore that surrounds them in the Middle Eastern cultures she describes.

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