Claudia Roden

Born in Cairo to a Syrian-Jewish family of Sephardi and Mizrahi descent, she made her home in London and wrote A Book of Middle Eastern Food and The Book of Jewish Food, preserving the cooking of the Sephardi and Mizrahi world for readers everywhere.

Who is Claudia Roden?

Claudia Roden is a food writer and cultural anthropologist whose books brought the cooking of the Middle East and of the Sephardi and Mizrahi world to readers around the globe. Her Book of Jewish Food is a history of Jewish communities told through their recipes, and for millions of readers it was the first place they learned how Jews in Aleppo, Salonica, Fez or Baghdad cooked and lived.

Cairo

Claudia Douek was born in Cairo in 1936, into a Syrian-Jewish family. Her father, Cesar Elie Douek, and her mother, Nelly Sassoon, came from prominent merchant families whose ancestors had moved from Aleppo to Egypt in the nineteenth century. She grew up in the Zamalek district of Cairo, in the cosmopolitan Jewish world of twentieth-century Egypt, and as a teenager was Egypt’s national backstroke swimming champion.

In 1951 she went to school in Paris, and in 1954 she moved to London to study painting. After the Suez crisis of 1956, when most of Egypt’s Jews were forced to leave, her family joined her in London, part of the end of a Jewish community that had lived in Egypt for more than two thousand years.

Preserving a world through its food

In London, cooking for her brothers and for the scattered Egyptian Jewish exiles around her, she began collecting family recipes. Refugees from Egypt and the Middle East shared with her the dishes of their homes, and with them their memories. Her first book, A Book of Middle Eastern Food, published in 1968, was a revelation to English-speaking readers and remains a classic.

Her Book of Jewish Food, published in 1996 after many years of research, traces the cooking of Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities across the world and the history behind it. It won the National Jewish Book Award and is regarded as one of the most important books on Jewish food ever written. Her many other books include works on the foods of Spain, Italy, Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, and she has presented food programs for the BBC.

Her writing joins recipes with history, travel and the stories of the people who shared them. Food historians credit her with deepening the way food is written about, treating it as a window into culture, identity and memory.

Recognition

She has served as president of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery and has been made an honorary fellow of University College London and of the School of Oriental and African Studies, among many other honors.

Claudia Roden’s legacy for Sephardim

When the Jewish communities of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and North Africa were uprooted in the twentieth century, much of their daily life was in danger of being forgotten. Claudia Roden preserved one of its most intimate parts: the food of the home, of Shabbat and of the festivals. Her books carry the tastes of Aleppo, Cairo and Salonica into kitchens around the world, and keep alive the memory of the communities that created them.