Claudia Roden
Cookbook writer and cultural anthropologist
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.”
Appears in
Podcasts
Konafa a la Creme with Claudia Roden
In the season finale of the Kitchen Radio podcast, icon of the Middle Eastern and Jewish food worlds, Claudia Roden, makes an Egyptian-Jewish version of Konafa which is one of the region’s most beloved desserts and her childhood favorite. Roden recounts a story of her family’s passage from Aleppo to Cairo from her book, “The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the Present Day,” a new edition of which has just been published. Learn more from Roden, author and cultural anthropologist, in the season one finale of Kitchen Radio, now streaming!
Kitchen Radio Guests
The Kitchen Radio podcast brings listeners to the table of communities from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region for intergenerational stories of community life and ritual practices from guests who are part of a rising renaissance of creative food projects exploring their oft-overlooked Jewish history and heritage.
In each episode, hosts Regine Basha (Founder of Tuning Baghdad) and Nathalie Basha (The Travel Muse), will feature a specific dish and a conversation to introduce the still little-known Jewish culture of the MENA region and re-seed Jewish life into a cultural space where their contribution was forgotten, rendered invisible or white-washed. Guests include: Tannaz Sassooni, Sephardic Spice Girls, Rafram Chaddad, Claudia Roden.