It takes a bit of work to be a grande dame. After 50 years of grafting, Claudia Roden has earned the title. The cookery book writer and cultural anthropologist, who celebrated her 85th birthday this month, published her first book in 1968, and is still hard at work. After a hiatus of almost a decade, her latest collection of recipes — Med — hit the shelves last week .
This book meant she enjoyed a more productive lockdown than many. At a time when she would have been entitled to put her feet up, Roden kept herself busy testing 120 recipes.
Her plan had been to take things easier writing this book — no long research trips nor time pressures: “I had been writing these recipes for the last five years. I didn’t want it to be rushed, but to come out from what I love to cook and what gives us — my family and friends — the most pleasure to eat.”
The recipe writing involved plenty of entertaining: “It was my way of inviting people to dinner, regularly, once a week, twice a week. It could be two three or a maximum of four people — just to be together.”
For most of that time she didn’t have a publishing contract, nor a deadline. Her agent, Lizzie Kremer, a regular guest at her table, was persistent in asking Roden to show the project to publishers.
About two years ago, Roden relented and the pitch went to seven companies. A bidding war ensued and she picked Ebury Press — publisher of her close friend Yotam Ottolenghi amongst others. “I like how his books look”.
Once the deal had been done, Ebury requested recipes by the following September. So, in April 2020, within weeks of lockdown, she found herself with a deadline. “It was a great challenge, but for me it was a saviour, because I’m living alone and was isolating. I had to completely focus on getting everything finished and done.”
Her first task was to whittle 300 recipes down to 120. The task was harder because each one of them was a favourite. This book had been the first exclusively made up of her own creations. From the start of her recipe writing career her books have mostly been collections of other people’s recipes — collated to preserve and reflect that culture’s cuisine.
“That meant I largely had to stick to what they had given me. For me, I cannot betray a country by changing the recipe — I can make it work but that’s all.”
So there was a freedom in this book to indulge her creativity and play with the recipes she had worked with over the years. Not that you’ll find too much cultural mixing. “I’m so attached to tradition and to culture. If I’m doing a Moroccan recipe I don’t put in flavours of Istanbul or of Cairo. I think what [other chefs] are doing with fusion and all that is marvellous, but it’s not me”. And this book is all about her.
Once she had picked her recipes, it was all hands on deck to test them. The pandemic didn’t make things easy. At first she could not get ingredients, even from online deliveries “I did not have an account with any of them and they would not accept me as I was not vulnerable. She would visit her local supermarket during the early hour allocated to her age group and neighbours, friends and family brought food.
When they visited with provisions she would feed her family, but to protect her they stayed in the garden. “They would drop food at the front door, then come round to the back to sit at a table in my garden. They felt terrible when I carried plates of food to them as they could not come in and help me.”
Lockdown did help in some ways: “My children and grandchildren were working or studying from home and all cooking, so I sent them recipes to test. I had trained them all how to properly test — to take the temperature of the oven before you test and check again afterwards. They also had to give their impression on the taste.”
The book is more personal. She writes in her introductory chapter: ‘The aim of this book is to highlight what to me is the best of the Mediterranean and adapt it how we like to eat today. It is what I cook when I entertain friends and family’. She include stories that give an insight into her world — “I wanted it to be memories of dishes”.
These tales bring a burst of colour to the pages: a smoked cod’s roe paste-based, tarama, that she enjoyed in a Cypriot café as an art student in London; bottling gazpacho in Andalusia; an aubergine salad with pomegranate dressing and yoghurt, inspired by her family’s Aleppo roots and a Slovenian frittata (or frtalja) inspired by much-loved nanny, Maria Koron.
She confesses to having worried how the book would look, as photographer, Susan Bell, had only managed one trip to Tuscany. “I wanted more photographs of the markets and places relevant to the food of the Mediterranean, but no one could travel.” She says she discovered an old photograph album and used some of her own snaps — “I’m delighted with how it turned out.”
What are her tips for entertaining? “Take days in advance to think and make it part of the pleasure. Write a long list and then choose from that menu the things that go best together.”
She tells me that she cooked for seven guests the night before. “To make it easy, I include some dishes I can do in advance, cold starters for example, so I don’t have everything going in and out of the oven. Especially for me as I’m on my own, but yesterday my daughter Anna [Wolman] came to help me. She brought her work and did that in between helping me prep. All of the children have come and helped one way or another.”
On her menu was labneh which she flavoured with a little garlic and lemon zest and grated cucumber (“like a deconstructed tzatziki”) and pepperonata (“sweet and sour peppers cooked so long it’s fondue [melting]”) and potatoes with a green tapenade of olives and anchovies. For the main course there was a bulgur pilaff, which she says “is the ideal thing to do for a lot of people. I mixed in aubergines and baby tomatoes at the last minute — I have a way of cooking aubergines where you use hardly any oil but you have a lid so they cook in their own juice.”
She added halloumi, using an interesting technique — “instead of frying I followed the Iraqi Jewish way of boiling it in slices. You can cook it for up to half an hour, but you must bring it out in its saucepan which is boiling hot as you want your guests to eat it hot. They were all very impressed as they eat halloumi but they grill it.”
Now Med is off her desk, will she be slowing down? “No. Because you’ve got to do something. I haven’t taken up bridge or golf — I’d be too old for golf — and I’m not a lady who lunches. A lot of my friends also haven’t stopped — they’re all retired but they never really do because they have so many things going on. They don’t retire in their minds.”
Med (Ebury Press) is out now
