As with bourride, a similar Provençal fish stew, rosé would be a great choice, or, in this case, Spanish rosado, as long as it is dry. Recipes: Bullinada (Catalan Fish Stew With Aioli) | Yogurt Cake And to Drink …Ī dish like this stew needs a wine that can cut through its creamy pungency. Roden said as the light cast a warm glow over her garden, “and enjoying all of my memories.” “Writing this book was a way of bringing back my past,” Ms. And you have this sense of what it would be like at her house in Cairo, sitting on her terrace, watching the sunset.” “All of a sudden, there are all these exquisite little plates in front of you, and she’s telling you to dip something in olive oil. In addition, she spent 10 years researching recipes and customs from other parts of the Arab world. These became the cornerstone not only for “A Book of Middle Eastern Food,” but also for “The Book of Jewish Food,” since most of the families who passed through the Doueks’ home were from the Sephardic Jewish diaspora. She amassed more than 1,000 recipes and stories this way. “If we don’t collect it,” she said, “it will disappear.” Roden said, adding that it was all part of preserving culture and identity. “We all felt a very strong need to collect, to record,” Ms. Roden took notes, detailing regional pilaf variations and each cook’s method of layering onions, tomatoes and pita bread into fattoush. They shared the secrets to their dishes so that when any one of them prepared that rich orange-almond cake or a mint-sprinkled tahini salad, they would remember one another and feel loved and understood. Roden heard the women ask the same question - “Do you have any recipes?” - every time a cousin or friend would arrive. Roden married Paul Roden when she was 22 the couple had three children before separating in 1974.) And women were freer to choose their husbands. The exchange of recipes became a currency, a way of communicating and expressing love. Roden absorbed and which helped her research and write “ The Food of Spain,” published in 2011. Her maternal grandmother, who could trace her ancestry back to pre-Inquisition Spain, spoke Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), which Ms. Roden’s first language was French (as it was for all cosmopolitan Jews in Cairo), followed by Italian (the language of her beloved nanny), English and Arabic. This was when the Egyptian capital supplanted Aleppo as the region’s mercantile center after the opening of the Suez Canal.Ĭairo had a diverse, polyglot culture.

Memories of CairoĬlaudia Douek was born in 1936 to a large, prominent Syrian Jewish family, who had emigrated to Cairo in the 19th century. By that time, her family had long been expelled from Egypt, and her childhood home was gone. That’s when she left for boarding school in Paris, and didn’t return until a quarter-century later. “When the book came out, people would always ask me if all the recipes were for testicles and eyeballs.”Īt the border of the lawn stood a hedgerow of scarlet-blossomed fuchsia trees reminiscent of the florescent bougainvillea on her family’s terrace in Cairo, where she lived until she was 15. Roden, who identifies as a Sephardi/Mizrahi Jew (Mizrahi is the Israeli term for Jews from the Middle East and North Africa). “At that moment, no one was interested in the food of the enemy culture,” said Ms. Roden’s book was all but ignored when it came out, on the heels of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, in which Britain supported Israel. “‘A Book of Middle Eastern Food’ has been around for so long it feels like prehistory,” he said, adding, “it was really revelatory for its time.”Īlthough it’s hard to imagine, in the midst of Britain’s current love affair with Middle Eastern flavors, that the cuisine was considered outlandish and unappealing in the 1960s. Roden with laying the foundation for chefs like him. Yotam Ottolenghi, the chef, cookbook author and New York Times food columnist,credits Ms. Roden’s work that took on the entire cuisine of the Middle East in depth, in ways both scholarly and highly personal. David had already published a handful of Middle Eastern recipes - notably, hummus bi tahina - in her far-ranging “ A Book of Mediterranean Food” in 1950. Roden started writing “A Book of Middle Eastern Food,” Ms.

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