The best of both worlds

Claudia Roden has spent a lifetime writing about Jewish, Italian and Middle-Eastern food. Sybil Kapoor meets a woman who has revolutionised the way we eat

Sitting in Claudia Roden's kitchen, looking at the half-empty jars of olives and salted lemons, it is hard to imagine a time in Britain when aubergines were suspiciously foreign and pitta bread virtually unknown. Elizabeth David may have convinced the British that olive oil and garlic were good in the early Sixties, but it was Roden who introduced us to Middle Eastern delicacies such as tabbouleh, filo pastry and cucumber yoghurt soup.

After her seminal first work in 1968, A Book of Middle Eastern Food, in which she helped to reshape the Western diet with Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cooking, she then created waves in 1996 by publishing The Book of Jewish Food. This week, her book The Taste of Italy, which marked the beginning of Britain's current obsession with Italian food, has just been republished. Based on a year's research conducted while travelling around the country, it continues to be used as a valuable source of information on regional cooking by Italian aficionados.

Born in Cairo in 1936, the only daughter of Sephardic Jews from Aleppo and Istanbul, the family enjoyed a lively, cosmopolitan life, that centred around social gatherings and food. Conversations at home would flow from French to Arabic or Judeo-Spanish, while Roden spoke Italian to her nanny and English at school. In due course, she was sent to Paris to finish her schooling before going to live with her two brothers in London and study at St Martins College of Art and Design. "I remember that people used to love our student cooking," she recalls. "At that time, simple things like pasta were still unusual in England."

Then, in 1956, after the Suez Crisis, her life changed dramatically. "My parents had to leave Egypt as a result of the war with Israel. We were stateless, poor and seeking asylum," she explains. Food began to assume ever greater importance within the family, despite the fact that in London, at that time, Greek Cypriot shops were the only places where you could find Middle Eastern ingredients, such as fresh coriander, bulgur wheat, aubergines, dried white beans and filo pastry.

As more and more friends and family began to arrive in London, Roden started to become obsessed with the idea of collecting and writing down their recipes. "I suppose it began out of a sense of nostalgia," she says. "All the people who came into my life at that time had lost a lot, but the one thing they could still share was recipes. I felt that I had to write them down before they were completely lost. At one point, I couldn't meet anybody without asking them for a recipe." Since Middle-Eastern cooking relied entirely on verbal tradition, this was not always easy; fried garlic, for example, was ready when its scent began to rise, while dough only had enough flour when it felt like an ear lobe.

During the next 10 years, Roden started to delve deeper, studying culinary medieval Arab manuscripts in the British Museum and busying herself translating, collating and cooking her recipes. Inspired by Elizabeth David's Mediterranean Food (1950) which briefly touched on Egyptian cooking, her desire to publish increased. "I wanted to try and make the food seem more appealing, so I added stories, jokes and historical background to the recipes, because at that time Middle-Eastern food had a bad image here." The resulting book was published by Nelson in 1968, and has the same lyrical feel as Elizabeth David's Mediterranean Food, but far greater depth of knowledge. Jill Norman, who formed the Penguin cookery list, snapped up the paperback rights within a month of it being published. It has remained in print ever since.

Unlike other food writers, who churn out books and articles to remain in the public eye, Roden only wrote two books in the following ten years – Coffee, and Picnics and Other Outdoor Feasts. Norman then suggested that she wrote a book about Jewish food. The writer's initial reaction was, "My goodness, is there such a thing? We are all over the world and how can I possibly encapsulate so many different types of cooking in one book?" Nevertheless, the idea stuck and she spent the next 16 years working on it, alongside her other projects.

Wherever she travelled for her journalism, she sought out the local Jewish community and learnt about their food. "The kitchen is a very intimate place and people open up to you when they are cooking," she remarks. "Jewish cooking is like a secret food – you never know where you will find it. I unexpectedly met Indian Jews in Australia, just as I discovered that Jews lived in Bukhara [in Uzbekistan] when someone gave me the telephone number of their mother, who lived there."

As the manuscript grew, she began to subdivide the contents between Ashkenazi and Sephardic cooking. The two developed separately, divided initially by the geographical boundaries of northern and southern Europe. Ashkenazi food developed in the Christian context of Russia, and western and eastern Europe, while Sephardic recipes mainly evolved in the Islamic Middle East and Christian Southern Europe around the Mediterranean. Even now, despite receiving numerous prizes and containing 800 recipes, the writer obviously still itches to enlarge her original work.

Roden's life is now divided between writing in her two homes in London and Paris, and travelling the world attending meetings and talks on Middle Eastern, Jewish and Mediterranean food. As the political problems in the Middle East deepen, different groups have called upon her to take a political stance. "I've been happy in both worlds and I want to try and create greater understanding through my writing. Food can be a great unifier."

'The Taste of Italy' is published by Chatto & Windus, priced £25.