The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  Roden was famous much sooner than she was solvent. Penguins, in those days, sold for a few shillings a copy—which is to say it was not much money for a woman paying the mortgage on a big North London house and trying to raise three children on her own. For two years after her separation in 1974, Roden gave cooking classes at home, an experience that her son, Simon, describes as six or seven middle-aged English ladies up to their wrists in Iranian rice pudding or Lebanese meatballs, making a mess of the kitchen. The children were alternately amused, irritated (they did the washing up), and impressed by Roden’s foray into the world of business stationery and flyers. Simon, a London architect with a wife and two boys, told me, “After my dad left, he went bankrupt. We were on our own. We’d have these guys at the door, like bailiffs, trying to take the TV, but my mom was tough. She shouted them down.” His sister Anna, a financial manager with a husband and three girls, says, “Mom could make a piece of broccoli on a plate look lovely, but it was so horrible, that worry.” She thinks that even today, ten books and considerable celebrity down the line (a James Beard Award for Cookbook of the Year; six Glenfiddich awards; and in Holland, the Prince Claus Fund Award for cultural achievement, the first ever given to a food writer), Roden is marked by those lean years. “If I had one word for my mom, it would be ‘martyr.’ She won’t willingly take a taxi. She refuses to have a housekeeper. Last year she finally replaced the upstairs carpeting. It took us thirty years to persuade her.”

  Roden’s kitchen remains resolutely unchanged. She calls it “my seventies kitchen,” because that was when she put in the countertops and the cabinets and bought the stove and the yellow-and-blue Portuguese splatter tiles and the long table where she spreads whatever recipes she is testing, and does her chopping and peeling and a lot of her entertaining. There are always garden roses and a bowl of mangoes on the table. When a friend stops by, Roden reaches into the bowl, the way another woman might reach for knitting, feels for the ripest fruit, and starts slicing and peeling while they talk. When she is ready to eat, she simply pushes everything aside, gets some plates, and brings out a loaf of bread, a package of Serrano ham, and maybe some good Spanish anchovies, a dish of roasted peppers, and a bottle of whatever wine she has opened a day or two before. She knows good wine; she is delighted to be served it, but she rarely buys it. She carries the notion of simple table wine to a Mediterranean extreme. Her sink is usually piled with pots and dishes, waiting their turn in the backup dishwasher in her laundry room—an open, converted pantry where every surface is covered with sacks and tins and bottles of the beans, oils, peppers, fish, and spices that she is using to test recipes for her book about Spanish food. A second pantry is entirely given over to the grains and preserves and flower waters that she keeps in stock for Middle Eastern meals. (Her latest, and perhaps most inventive, book, Arabesque, is devoted to the food of Morocco, Lebanon, and Turkey. She had hoped to include Iran and Syria, and when that was vetoed, she threatened, only half in jest, to produce a sequel called “The Food of the Axis of Evil.”)

  On Sundays, Roden has the family to lunch. In spring and summer, they eat in a big garden off the kitchen, where the older grandchildren can kick a soccer ball while the younger ones poke through a tangle of overgrown hedges, hoping to catch a glimpse of the two prize pigs that the BBC presenter who lives next door is raising as family pets. Roden uses those lunches to test and retest her most problematic recipes, like the one for slow-roasted Andalusian lamb where the lamb ended up swimming in a thin puddle of honey, white wine, and rendered fat. (Her son-in-law, who may have been forewarned, arrived that day with a bag of bread, cookies, and cold cuts from the nearest Marks & Spencer.) “She’ll call, she’ll say, ‘I made it again,’” Anna told me. “We are the ‘taste it again’ people.” Roden presides over the tastings with an indulgent, if somewhat distracted, calm. “You can see why I can’t let anyone clean here,” she said one afternoon when I was helping unload the dishwashers and discovered that some of the wooden spoons went into a basket on the kitchen sideboard, and others went into the dining room, thirty feet away; and that the silverware was divided according to some obscure logic among three far-flung drawers. “You see, everything has settled into different drawers and places. You can’t put it away. Everything would end up in the wrong place. I would never find it.”

  In 1980, Roden began thinking about her book on Jewish food. By then she was finishing two more books: a short history of coffee and a pleasant, idiosyncratic foray into alfresco food called Picnic, which ran the gamut from Hong Kong barbecue to Glyndebourne on the grass. She was in demand on the lecture circuit and the conference circuit and the cooking-demonstration circuit, and she was writing about food for most of the best British papers. But The Book of Jewish Food was a singularly daunting project—a history of Jewish life and settlement, told through the story of what Jews ate and where and why, and how they made it. Jill Norman—the idea for the book was hers—had urged Roden to sign a contract; Judith Jones, who edited the book, had called it her “logical, natural next step”; and Jane Grigson had been encouraging her to write it. Even so, she was reluctant to take it on, and even more reluctant to finish once she did. It absorbed her for the next sixteen years, and staked a claim on whatever diffidence as a writer she still had. “Sixteen years, and I just couldn’t let go,” she told me. “My friends thought it would be published posthumously.”

  Hampstead Garden Suburb is part of a Northwest London catchment area where so many Jews have settled over the last century that the government was finally persuaded to turn it into an eruv—an area circled by a string wire in which Orthodox Jews can push a baby carriage or carry keys on the Sabbath, enjoying a state of exemption from their own rules. Roden herself is devotedly secular. She says that her parents left Orthodoxy behind when they moved to a mixed Cairo neighborhood and developed a taste for seafood—“I asked my father what he liked best on a night out; he said, ‘Prawns and beer’”—and for the ham at Groppi, the famous old Cairo café. But she is attached to her London neighborhood, in part because so many Middle Easterners work nearby. When she was writing Middle Eastern Food and Arabesque, she could get in her car and in a few minutes be at the Hormuz market, on Finchley Road, shopping for dried Iranian limes and Lebanese rosewater and even melokhia, from Egypt. Now, testing recipes for Jewish Food, she could go to Frohwein’s Kosher Butchers, or to the Indian supermarket with a “Jewish floor,” or in an emergency—she swears that she never had one—to one of the halal butchers in the neighborhood. “Well, in Cairo my grandfather once saw the kosher butcher buying from the Muslim butcher” is how she puts it. (Either way, it was a trial for Roden, since the meat that Muslims and Orthodox Jews eat, which is ritually drained of blood, loses much of its flavor in the process.) When the subject was fish, she could go to the fishmonger in Golders Green who kept a list of the “forbidden fish”—anything without scales—in his window. She remembers the excitement, in the richer precincts of Northwest London, when a board of rabbis announced the discovery of a vestigial scale on a baby sturgeon, and caviar went on sale.

  Two-thirds of the three hundred thousand Jews in Great Britain (and 90 percent of the world’s Jews) are said to trace their origin to Eastern Europe, and it is safe to say that they were never known for the delicacy of their cuisine. Bagels and matzo balls aside, it’s hard to think of an Ashkenazi contribution to the British diet. Not even the fish in fish and chips, long attributed to a nineteenth-century Eastern European immigrant (and East End restaurateur) named Joseph Malin, is Ashkenazi. Malin’s recipe for deep-fried cod—served with a side of fries, and now consumed by Brits to the tune of two hundred and fifty million orders a year—was in fact carried to England by sixteenth-century Portuguese Marranos, or you could say, by ur-Sephardic Jews. (According to Thomas Jefferson, who tried it, it was known as “fried fish in the Jewish fashion.”) Roden, growing up, had rarely tasted Ashkenazi food, and had since managed to avoid it (most publicly, at a conference in Jerusalem called
“Gefilte Fish or Couscous,” which included a cook-off between the Sephardic and Ashkenazi guests, and which she describes this way: “None of us went to the Ashkenazi side to taste, but all the Ashkenazi came to ours”). She was not enthusiastic about starting now. “I don’t feel British,” she told me. “I don’t consider myself like one of the Eastern European Jews. We have nothing in common with those Jews. We lived in a Muslim world, they live in a Christian world. They are not me.”

  There was, of course, no way to write the story of Jewish food without including the food that most Jews in the world once ate, and many still eat. Jill Norman told her to remember that those people knew nothing about Sephardic food—that the contrast was what was interesting. “Little by little, I got interested,” Roden says. She told the story of Ashkenazi settlement as it moved eastward from Germany through Poland and into Russia, and then turned back across what Auden once called beer-and-potato-culture Europe, with its joyless, wintery kitchens. And in the process she managed to collect some three hundred surprisingly good Ashkenazi recipes. A few—her Shavuot cheese blintzes; her Hungarian-Jewish goulash—could even be considered worthy of a Sephardic kitchen. And never mind that she failed spectacularly with matzo balls. (She left out the chicken fat and the seltzer, separated the eggs, and then beat the whites, as if she were planning to float oeufs à la neige in her chicken soup.) When I asked how she came by such a peculiar recipe—“America,” she said—she admitted to having been less than discerning when it came to some of the Ashkenazi dishes, matzo balls being the first, gefilte fish the second, and a cake called lekach, which she actually liked, the third. A day later, she said that I shouldn’t really count the lekach, because the problem had to do with a slip in her metric-to-imperial-cup conversions and she corrected that in the next edition, and besides, the recipe was now famous and has won many awards.

  But the heart of her story belongs to the Sephardim. Two-thirds of the recipes are Sephardic—“Just the opposite of the population figures,” she likes to say—and they describe a world that once stretched from Spain to China, and now reached westward to the Pacific. (Israeli reviewers called the book “the Sephardic revenge.”) Roden says that she worked like a sleuth on the Sephardic chapters. “It was like writing a mystery,” she told me. “The Jews of the Sephardic diaspora—well, in those days you couldn’t Google and find them. And in a way I’m glad, because it made the work sort of exciting. My parents had had this thing, when they traveled, of looking for Jews. I became like them. My cousin Eric, in Paris”—Eric Rouleau, Le Monde’s former Middle East correspondent, who was the French ambassador to Tunisia and Turkey during those years—“said, ‘Claudia, when are you going to stop looking for Jews?’”

  In the end, Roden went to fifteen countries looking for Jews, and nearly as many countries where she wasn’t looking but found them anyway. She told me, “It proves that when Jewish people are there, and you meet them, there is always a cuisine.” She financed the first of these trips by writing two more cookbooks, in the late eighties; they became bestsellers, to no one’s surprise but hers. (The first, Mediterranean Cookery, grew out of a television series that she was putting together for the BBC. The second, The Food of Italy, began as a year of region-by-region pieces for the London Sunday Times Magazine: “I was in Turin. I was in a hotel. I knew no one. So I opened the phone book and started calling the numbers on the page.”) The rest of her trips, which took her through the early nineties, were in large part sponsored by the Telegraph. “I was writing a monthly column,” as she tells the story. “Whenever I tried to stop, the paper said, ‘We’ll send you. Go for us, and then take a day or two off and look for Jews.’ Which is what I did.”

  She still talks about the Jews she didn’t meet. She missed the Surinam Jews—which is to say their recipe for a Surinamese root vegetable called pom. (She has it now.) She missed the Falasha from Ethiopia; they lived in Israel by then, but none of them ever showed up when she arranged meetings. And she never got to China, to look for traces of the old Jewish settlement in Kaifeng—“Muslims with blue kipas,” the Chinese called them—which in all likelihood had once supplied local agents to the Baghdad branch of her mother’s far-flung Sassoon family. (Today those Jews are indistinguishable from everyone else in Kaifeng, and are said to know nothing about Judaism, let alone about Jewish Chinese food.) But those, arguably, were all she missed.

  It may have been just as well, because, as she often says, there is no such thing as one Sephardic recipe for anything. There are Sephardic recipes, as particular to the places where Jews lived, and the people they lived with, as an Arab couscous from Morocco or Algeria. The Iraqi Jews didn’t like the food of the Syrian Jews; they called the Syrians “cows,” because they ate too much parsley. The Syrians didn’t like the Iraqis’ food, because it had too much fat and meat. Then, there were the Iraqis in Iran, who united the Jews of Lebanon and Syria against them by putting beetroot in their kibbeh. The Sabbath stew of the Livorno Jews, from Portugal and Spain, was nothing like the stews of the Jews in Rome—or even of the Jews in Venice, many of whom came from Sicily and Turkey. The almond pastries of the Comtat Jews, who had lived in Provence under the protection of the Avignon popes, were nothing like the pastries other Sephardim ate. There were the Izmir Jews, whose food was different from the food of the Istanbul Jews; the Jews of Bombay, whose food was different from the food of their cousins in Calcutta, or Goa or Cochin. And, of course, there were the Jews of Aleppo, like the Doueks, who wouldn’t dream of making Damascus dishes, though they ate them happily enough at the parties of Damascene friends in Cairo.

  The book is a kind of archive. People look to it for the “authentic” recipes of Jewish settlement, and Roden tends to believe in the idea of authenticity. The Wall Street Journal Europe arts and food writer Paul Levy, Roden’s co-chairman at the yearly Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, told me, “Claudia is a wonderful cook, but you have to remember that her kitchen is a place of exploration. She’s impelled to codify. That’s good. It means that she is not distracted by the lack of success of a dish. What is this supposed to taste like? That’s her most important question. She has that impossible anthropological goal.” And her old friend Sami Zubaida, an Iraqi Jew who taught politics and sociology at the University of London for more than thirty years, said, “She is on a hunt for the correct version. Her book is enormously attractive for her empathy, but her argument tends to be that if the Jews ate it, then it’s authentic Jewish food. Some of the Arabs who read the book were outraged. They thought it was their food. They said, ‘The food is the same, the difference is in the word for it.’” Nigella Lawson, who is an ardent fan, put it this way: “Things change, products change, and you can have a huge argument about how something should be cooked. When you do an awful lot of research, like Claudia, you have to stand back sometimes and ask, ‘Do I really want to eat this?’”

  One afternoon in late May, I asked Roden what she meant by “authenticity.” It was a day of tasting recipes. We were about to leave for Asturias, one of the provinces she had yet to visit for her book on Spanish food, and were sitting at her kitchen table, debating the relative merits of five or six scribbled recipes for a Catalan romesco sauce (a rich purée of almonds, hazelnuts, tomatoes, sweet dried Spanish peppers, garlic, bread, and saffron) while waiting for the beans to cook for an Asturian fabada (white beans, chorizos, blood sausages, and saffron) and for the squid to defrost for a Catalan chipirónes en su tinta con fideos (squid, vermicelli, onions, garlic, white wine, parsley, and tomatoes). I wanted to know which of the romesco recipes looked to Roden to be the most authentic. They were all from good Catalan cooks, cooks she knew and trusted, and yet they were quite different. One recipe said to use one tomato, another said ten. One recipe said to fry the peppers and garlic, another said not to. In the end, Roden chose the recipe with the most nuts, adjusted it slightly, turned on the food processor, tasted the result, and pronounced it “my best so far.” To me, it was perfect. “Most good things
just happen,” she said. “I don’t proceed in a very organized way. I choose what I like, I trust my taste. I tell people, ‘Well, what else do you trust but your own taste.’” For Roden, the word “authentic” is very simple: it means that “you can’t invent with new ingredients”—unless, like some of the diaspora Jews, new ingredients are all you have. She thinks that cookbook critics (she has had her share) tend to forget that between the “big change” of the 1500s, when the produce and animals of the Americas first reached Europe and the Middle East, and the revolution in transportation, travel, and communication of the postwar years, there was very little variation in the food that ordinary people—people rooted in one place—ate, and in the way they prepared it.

  Roden has been traveling to Spain for the past two and a half years, and one of the things she likes about the country is that the food is still so regional and the culinary history so particular—“a little Visigoth, and then the Moors and the Jews and the Catholic clergy and the French, and of course the New World, and what the rich took from it, the chocolate, the game, and what the poor took, the vegetables and the beans and the corn.” In the food of Andalusia, where the Moors ruled for eight hundred years, you can still taste Spanish Islam. In the food of Aragon and Castile, where the courtiers in Ferdinand’s entourage were as often as not Catholic converts, or conversos, you can still taste Spanish Judaism. Roden told me that before the Inquisition the Jews in Spain used olive oil for cooking, the Muslims used clarified butter, and the Christians used pork fat. After the expulsion, everyone switched to fat, and the conversos hung hams in their houses the way they hung crucifixes and rosaries—conspicuously, fearfully, hoping to convince Inquisitors on the prowl that Spain belonged entirely to Christ. She discovered that Sephardic desserts, like her orange-and-almond cake, had survived in Spanish convents, brought by novices from converso families, and that the rice puddings of the Middle East—she has three rice pudding recipes in Middle Eastern Food, including one with anise, to which I am addicted—had somehow, over the centuries, made their way to northern Spain, and even to Asturias, which had been effectively cut off from the rest of the country, by the Picos de Europa range, until the 1960s. She wanted to ask Asturians for their mothers’ pudding recipes.