Kitchen Radio Guests

Born on Djerba, an island off the coast of southern Tunisia, Rafram Chaddad (b. 1976) is an artist whose photographs, films, and multi-media installations to rethink the archive, migration narratives, and what it means to belong. His work makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar.

Since 2019, he has been conducting research for Leftovers, an upcoming book investigating how food practices in cities formerly occupied by the Ottoman Empire are inter-connected. The book highlights recipes particular to each place and oral histories around food-making that challenge the nationalization of food and encourage us to approach food as a shared experience.

Working between Tunis and New York, Rafram’s work reflects on his personal life experiences and comments on broader socio-political issues including migration and displacement, identity and belonging.

Over the past twenty years, he’s created dozens of short films and installations, which have exhibited worldwide in cultural institutions, galleries, and museums, including: Kunst im Tunnel, Dusseldorf; Kunstraum, New York; Kayu Lucie Fontaine Gallery, Bali; Lucie Fontaine, Milan; ArteEast foundation, New York; Halle 14, Leipzig; and Zalatimo, east Jerusalem. Chaddad has held solo shows at the Mucem Museum in Marseilles and the Maximilian Forum in Munich, among others.

Claudia Roden CBE (née Douek; born 1936) is an Egyptian-born British cookbook writer and cultural anthropologist of Sephardi/Mizrahi descent. She is best known as the author of Middle Eastern cookbooks including A Book of Middle Eastern Food, The New Book of Middle Eastern Food and Arabesque—Sumptuous Food from Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon.

Besides her numerous cookery volumes, Roden has also worked as a food writer and a cooking show presenter for the BBC.

Food writers and chefs such as Melissa Clark and Yotam Ottolenghi have credited her with playing a large role in introducing the food of Egypt in particular and the Middle East in general to Britain and the United States. Paul Levy classes her with such other food writers as Elizabeth David, Julia Child, Jane Grigson, and Sri Owen who, from the 1950s on, “deepened the conversation around food to address questions of culture, context, history and identity.” Her many cookbooks, Clark writes, have “produced a genre of works that is at once literary and deeply researched while still being, at heart, practical manuals on how to make delicious meals.”

Born in Tehran to a Jewish family, Tannaz is a Los Angeles-based food writer who’s written for The Forward, Thrillist, Lucky Peach, LAist, The Mashup Americans, My Jewish Learning/The Nosher, and the Zaman Collective. She’s interested in exploring Los Angeles’ global culinary landscape and interviewing mothers and grandmothers from Iran for a regional Iranian Jewish cookbook. Follow Tannaz on Instagram: @tannazsassooni

Rachel Emquies Sheff was born in Casablanca to a Spanish Moroccan family that emigrated to Los Angeles when she was seven. She learned to cook from her mother. From precious pearls of couscous to spicy mouthfuls of Moroccan fish, from slow-cooked dafina to crispy, paper thin galettes, Rachel has mastered the art, spice and spirit of the Moroccan kitchen.

Sharon Gomperts was born in Tel Aviv to a family with roots in Baghdad and El Azair, Iraq. Her family emigrated to Sydney, Australia and then to Los Angeles. She learned to cook the classics of Iraqi Jewish food—from the sweet and sour wonders of Kubbah bamia and Kubbah sh’wander to the mouthwatering delights of T’bit and Sabich—from her mother and grandmother.