I’ll confess: I’m a huge fan of everything Claudia Roden! She is my major Guru, when it comes to food. If it weren’t for her, Pachamama would not know what to do in the kitchen…! 
Well, I would, but things wouldn’t be the same.
Even if you’re only slightly into cooking, do yourself and your messmates a favor and get yourself one of her beautiful books! All her recipes are very user-friendly, ranging from utterly simple to somewhat more elaborate. But most important of all – you’ll get mouthwatering luscious results!
About Claudia:
Claudia Roden was born to a cosmopolitan Jewish family in Cairo, where she grew up eating – and questioning the origin of – food from all over the Middle East. She began by collating recipes at a young age from everybody she met, from family members to virtual strangers. “Food was,” she explains, “a way of re-connecting with my culture – my lost heritage. And the discovery of a 13th century manuscript in the British Library eventually led to my interest in food sociology and anthropology.”
Claudia’s meticulously researched first book, A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968), transformed Western attitudes towards this then little-known cuisine. No longer was the Middle East seen purely in political terms – Claudia introduced the aromatic and wholesome ingredients of Middle Eastern cookery, and her writing bristled with passion and warmth. Matthew Fort once wrote: “Claudia Roden guided me and thousands of other curious cooks through this fabulous culinary landscape with a mixture of humour, learning and delicate greed.”
Her aim is to simplify traditional recipes and make them accessible to a younger generation
Claudia says that in the age of globalisation and the Internet, it’s particularly important to record old recipes and understand their cultural context. “There’s room for modern food, but new for the sake of newness is not necessarily better. You need to preserve the old, too”, says Claudia. At a time when there’s an increasing emphasis on healthier, lighter cooking, her aim is to simplify traditional recipes and make them accessible to a younger generation.
Claudia has also written authoritatively about Mediterranean, Italian and Jewish food, and is currently writing a book on Spanish cookery. In a career spanning more than 45 years, she has won numerous awards and is considered iconic. As historian Simon Schama once stated: “Claudia Roden is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Proust was a biscuit baker. She is, rather, memorialist, historian, ethnographer, anthropologist, essayist, poet…”
