The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  Alford, for his part, was thinking about some time on his own in Thailand. He had fallen in love with Thailand in the seventies, on his first trip—with the food, the language, the music, the dancing that starts in the bars at midnight and goes on till five in the morning—and since then had managed to get back nearly every year. Three years ago, he and Duguid bought an apartment on the “liveliest, tastiest street” in Chiang Mai, sixty miles from the Burma border; he calls Chiang Mai “the city where I belong.” (“People are so much their jobs in Toronto,” he told me, “but in Chiang Mai I’m the one with more of a job than anybody.”) Last fall, writing there every day, he finished his first novel—a “love story” about four young junkies hanging on to each other and to their tattered lives in a Kathmandu flophouse called the Bluebird Lodge. He wanted to go back and begin a new one: “I’m thinking, it’s about northern Thailand, a year in the same place, some food in it, with me as the fly on the wall.”

  There was nothing to stop them. The boys were in college, the world would survive for a while longer without Celtic recipes, and as Duguid said, they never compete for space; they cede it. Alford put it this way: “We’re massive talkers, we negotiate.” But a few months later, to no one’s surprise but theirs, they set those plans aside and called Ann Bramson about a new cookbook they were going to write together. “It was a Saturday, but we were so excited, we called her cell phone and caught her in the middle of brunch with friends,” Duguid wrote to me that week. The book was going to be “Burma-focused,” because Burma, with its variety of tribal peoples, “closes the loop of food cultures” between the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, and because “the situation in Burma makes it all the more obvious and necessary to go”—and of course because the food there is spectacularly interesting. They were going to base themselves in Chiang Mai. Alford could start his new novel, and since they would both be there, why not hold a series of Chiang Mai cooking classes, featuring their local street vendors? Alford, in his own letter, called it “a chance to do something, workwise, to help make money for people we know who are struggling to survive.” They plan to leave this winter, right after their Toronto party. As Duguid says, “How good is that!”

  Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford separated and divorced in 2009. Since then, Alford has lived and cooked with a Thai woman in a Khmer village near the Cambodia border, and has produced a book about the food there. Duguid has spent much of the last ten years in exhaustive culinary commutes, first from Toronto to Burma—as a food scholar, she was one of the only Westerners allowed to travel freely there—and then to Iran and the four neighboring states of what she calls the Persian culinary region. The books she produced in those years, Burma: Rivers of Flavor and Taste of Persia, were instant classics.

  SPICE ROUTES

  NOVEMBER 2010

  One day some years ago, Claudia Roden was walking down the hall of an apartment house in North London, on her way to a friend’s, when she smelled a soup that reminded her of home. Roden was born in Cairo. She has lived in London for more than fifty years, and she carries a British passport, holds respectably British left-wing views, owns a big house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and has written ten cookbooks in the English language, including A Book of Middle Eastern Food and The Book of Jewish Food, and is finishing an eleventh, about the food of Spain. But if you ask where she’s from she says “Cairo,” and if you ask her about the soup she says, “Melokhia, a soup no one but we Egyptians like”—which, she also says, is why she followed the smell to a stranger’s door that day, rang the bell, introduced herself to the Egyptians inside (they were not at all surprised), and was promptly invited in for lunch. She describes the soup in a discouraging, or perhaps proprietary, way: “It’s made with a dark-green leaf, like a gelatinous spinach. You find it in all the Egyptian tombs, and now, through DNA, in the mummies’ stomachs.” But she’s wrong about no one except Egyptians liking it. I tried my first melokhia at a wonderful London restaurant called Moro, in Exmouth Market, and it was so good that I nearly canceled the rest of dinner and ordered more. “The melokhia? That’s Claudia,” Samantha Clark, who, with her husband, Samuel, cooks the food at Moro, told me. “Her Middle Eastern Food—when we opened the restaurant, we soaked it up like sponges. There was so much there, and we wanted to learn as much as possible from it. Some of our first menus were written with Claudia in mind, and the soup stayed.”

  Roden, at seventy, is one of the most revered writers in what the British call “cookery.” She is the youngest and last of a triumvirate of hungry, highly literate, and ethnographically indefatigable women who helped transform how Britain cooked and what it cooked, persuading the domestically challenged bourgeoisie of the postwar years that the taste of a good soup held a world of history and culture, and that the pleasures of the table did not stop at the shores of Albion but, in all likelihood, began there. The first of those women was the well-born, flagrantly libertine Elizabeth David, who had discovered the South in the course of a peripatetic wartime love affair, and then, with her books on French and Mediterranean food, produced a culinary revolution in a country where the sale of olive oil was mainly confined to pharmacies, as a balm for earaches, and where saffron, eggplant, and zucchini blossoms had barely entered the vocabulary, let alone anybody’s local market. The second woman was Jane Grigson, a modest, amiable translator who had studied at Cambridge and, with her husband, the poet Geoffrey Grigson, spent her summers in a village in the Loire Valley. She put the flair of the French into English cooking, and under her gentle instruction the overcooked Sunday joint became a juicy, garlicky leg of lamb and the leached vegetables got back their flavor. But Roden didn’t have to discover the South. She was born to it, at the heady end-of-empire moment when the British controlled Egypt but the markets of Alexandria and Cairo belonged to the Arabs, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Copts, and Jews who lived there, and meals, for the upper classes, were a serious, almost erotically exhausting pleasure. She left Egypt at fifteen, for a boarding school in Paris, and after a few years of returning for summer holidays, didn’t eat in Cairo again for a quarter century.

  Most people meeting Roden for the first time would find her very British. She has peachy skin and a smooth high brow, and at home she wears good, comfortable English country clothes: floppy skirts, pastel cashmere cardigans looped over her shoulders, and sensible shoes. But she is often told that she has an “Egyptian face,” and when you look closely you begin to see the East in the upturned curve of her smile and in the dark hair falling from a center part and in the almond eyes. When she is dressed for a party, wrapped in the silky rich blues and reds and purples of her evening clothes, Egypt is unmistakable. Everyone notices her eyes then, because they are rimmed with kohl. She can tell you how the women in the Middle East prepare their kohl. (“In Morocco, you burn a cloth with oil and keep the soot that collects” is one recipe.) But, like her recent attachment to vacuum-packed fish stock and frozen artichoke hearts, her own kohl recipe is updated and efficient. “I turn a Pyrex dish over a candle flame,” she says, “and within fifteen minutes I have enough soot for a year of powder.”

  She comes, in fact, from an old Syrian Jewish merchant family, or more accurately, from two old Syrian Jewish merchant families, the Doueks (her father, Cesar) and the Sassoons (her mother, Nelly), who had moved their operations to Cairo in the 1890s, following the cotton trade that opened with the Suez Canal. Two generations later, Nasser seized the canal and began expelling Jews and foreigners. The family today is scattered through Europe and the Americas. The Doueks and the Sassoons, like many Jewish traders in the Middle East, had grown prosperous over the centuries by dispatching their sons to the caravan stops of the silk and spice routes and the shipping ports of India and the Far East; and the most successful had kept their money (and their debts) in the family by marrying off their daughters if not to a cousin or an uncle, then to the sons of like-minded and equally prosperous Jewish merchants. The family’s business base and, you could say, its reprodu
ctive center was Aleppo, where, as Roden will tell you with a sweet smile, “there have been Jews since Abraham came through Syria with his sheep.” Her paternal great-grandfather was the chief rabbi of Aleppo during the last half century of Ottoman rule and, in line with his status and his family responsibilities, had sired an enormous brood—twenty-six children—most of whom multiplied as energetically as he had. Roden has hundreds of cousins and appears to know them all. Her daughter Nadia, an artist and a maker of animated films who lives in New York, says that the three Roden children grew up convinced that everyone they met besides their classmates and teachers was a relative, or might marry a relative and become one.

  Nelly and Cesar Douek arrived in London in 1956 (after a year in Sudan, whose only tangible benefit to the family was an excellent new recipe for tahini-lemon-and-yogurt cream). Claudia and her two brothers had already been in the city for two years, studying, and on Friday nights the Doueks’ house in Golders Green would fill with people of all ages passing through London on their way from Paris or Milan or Geneva to Mexico City or Los Angeles or Barranquilla—wherever the émigrés of the latest Sephardic diaspora had chosen to restart their lives. They spoke French—the language of choice among the Cairene bourgeoisie—slipping in and out of Arabic or English or Italian, depending on where they had lived, and where they were living now. Some of the old women spoke Ladino, the Hebrew-Castilian language of the Spanish Jews at the time of the expulsion of 1492. (“Sefarad” means Spain, in Hebrew, and originally referred only to Jews of Spanish and Portuguese origin.) Roden calls it “the language of women’s secrets.”

  The women, without servants to cook for them, would sit and gossip in Nelly Douek’s kitchen, and Roden began to watch and listen. She says that the first thing one woman would ask another was: What recipes do you have? They exchanged recipes, and sometimes argued about recipes. Was the kibbeh better in Aleppo or Damascus? Were the pastries better in Alexandria or Cairo? Roden had no interest in cooking then, but it was clear to her that families like hers, who had left their lives behind in the Middle East, had managed to carry one thing to the West with them—and that was the taste of the food they ate at home. The historian Donald Sassoon, a younger cousin of Roden’s and one of her closest friends, describes it this way: “At Claudia’s parents’, I was captured by a nostalgia that I didn’t even feel myself. The house would be full of exiles, going on and on about Egypt. ‘Oh, Nelly, the rugs, the jewels, the servants we used to have,’ they’d say—though the truth was we didn’t have such great carpets in Egypt, and the servants cost nothing, everybody had them. But we hadn’t lost our food. Our food was what made us different from the others, it was a way to distinguish ourselves without having to pay the price of ‘difference.’ Nelly, all those women—they cooked to re-create the Egypt of their youth.”

  Roden started writing down their recipes. “Even now, whenever I cook I think about how I got the recipe, who gave me the recipe, what their story was,” she says. Her “famous orange cake”—a rich Sephardic confection of eggs, sugar, oranges, and ground almonds that has been appropriated by so many other cookbook writers since she included it in Middle Eastern Food that she has lost count—was “Iris Galante’s, one of the Aleppo Galantes. She was the grandmother of my brother Ellis’s first wife, visiting from Italy. I watched her cook—she had a little handwritten book, and I said, ‘Can you give me a recipe?’ I got a windfall. The first recipe was pastellicos, from Salonika. That’s a little pie, with minced meat or cheese and onions. The French writer Edgar Morin called it the heart of the heart of Salonika. After Iris, I talked to everyone who came to the house. I started with the people from Egypt, and then with my parents’ friends from Turkey and Iran. ‘How much flour do you use?’ I’d ask them. The best answer came from Istanbul, or perhaps it was Izmir: ‘Press your earlobe. See how it feels. When the dough feels like your earlobe, it’s the right consistency.’”

  For Roden, it was an unexpected preoccupation. “In London, I had been free for the first time,” she says. “I was a Marxist—of course, I had never read Marx—and I went on marches and joined the New Left Club and went to art school at Saint Martin’s. I was going to be a painter, a muralist like Diego Rivera, or a filmmaker—which horrified my parents. Now suddenly I was under their jurisdiction again. I lived at home. I took a job, but they hated that. I was in reservations at Alitalia, and you could see me through the windows. My father was so ashamed. He wanted me in the house. ‘Why do we have girls?’ he said. ‘Because they’re the sunshine of the family.’ Whenever Egyptian friends came, he would tell me to call in sick—because for a daughter of the house not to be home when friends came! So suddenly I was embraced by the émigré world, submerged in it. I was researching my book without even knowing it was a book.”

  The Doueks thought of their daughter, at twenty-two, as stubbornly close to spinsterhood, having offered her one very eligible cousin to consider, before she was fifteen, and not long afterward, a “really ugly” businessman from India—both of whom she refused. But one day in 1958 she presented them with a nice young man who, they were somewhat scandalized to learn, had been sharing her table at a café down the street from Alitalia. A year later, she was married. Paul Roden was a self-made businessman from a family of Russian Jewish immigrants. He had gone to work at the age of sixteen, when his father died, and Cesar Douek liked him for that. The family welcomed him, to Claudia’s great relief, because for most Sephardic émigrés the Ashkenazi of Northern and Eastern Europe were an almost mythically bewildering people—“peasants” who raised carp in bathtubs for a tasteless dish called gefilte fish and didn’t know a cardamom pod from a coriander seed, or worse, the sort of intellectuals who had brought Zionism to a Middle East where, in the émigrés’ wishful imagination, everybody had got along. (Their view of Ashkenazi intellectuals was summed up admirably by Claudia’s great-uncle Moussa Douek: “Read and write? I have people who read and write for me.”)

  The marriage lasted for fifteen years, produced two girls and a boy, and gave Roden back a measure of independence. (She never married again, although by all accounts she was much courted.) More to the point, she had her own kitchen. She learned to cook, and spent the first ten years of her married life collecting and testing the recipes that became A Book of Middle Eastern Food. “I worked with Jane Grigson and Elizabeth David in mind,” she told me. “I had found a melokhia recipe in Elizabeth’s book on Mediterranean food, then a few more Middle Eastern recipes she had collected. She said, ‘This is the tip of the iceberg. Somebody has to take this much further.’ So I went to the British Library. ‘Are there any Arab cookery books?’ I asked. There were not. I wrote to Muslim friends in Egypt and asked them. The only cookery book they could find in Cairo was an old British quartermaster’s book from the Second World War, and it was all cauliflower and cheese, macaroni and cheese. So I went to the embassies here and talked to the people waiting. I sat in the Iranian embassy. They asked me, ‘Do you want a visa or a passport?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m here for recipes.’ I’d go to the big carpet warehouse on the Thames. The men were Iraqis. I would ask for their wives’ recipes. All through the sixties, I did that. I was raising a family and trying to paint—I painted the rabbis of Jerba; you can see them at the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, in Maida Vale—and I even wrote a play about the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi. But mainly I was home taking care of the children or I was looking for recipes.”

  She turned out to be a natural scholar, despite an almost insistently idyllic vision of (pre-Israel) Middle Eastern life that, forty years later and to the despair of her friends, remains untempered by reality. (“Of course I have an attachment to that life,” one of them told me. “It was a colonial and cosmopolitan world—that’s what made it attractive—but I’m more cynical than Claudia. I have bitter memories.”) Simon Schama once wrote that “Claudia Roden is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Proust was a biscuit baker.” Her Middle East is an act of imagination, a kind of d
omestication of memory, and to create it she prowled the stacks of obscure archives. She read historians, anthropologists, Arabists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets, hoping for information and inspiration. She spent a year testing a book of thirteenth-century Baghdad court recipes that had been unearthed and translated by an Arabist in Cambridge. She made friends with the French Marxist scholar and Muhammad biographer Maxime Rodinson, who had written his doctoral dissertation on a culinary manuscript from medieval Damascus. “I just got so interested in the history of food, and I was making all those medieval dishes, and it blew my mind—the idea that through food you could describe or reconstruct a world,” she says. She ended up reconstructing several worlds—eight hundred recipes, and a trove of folktales, proverbs, stories, poetry, and local history—and when she finally sat down to write, it was in a clear, humorous, elegant voice that she hadn’t known she had, a voice that could keep you up, nights, reading.

  When the book was finished, she went to Foyles and copied the name and address of every cookbook publisher in sight. It was 1967, the year of the Six-Day War, and the Middle East, as she puts it, “was not at all popular just then.” She ended up at a small house with an editor who, she was delighted to discover, had been born in Turkey. The book was a sleeper. Its reputation spread in England—“People here were completely bouleversés by those tastes,” Tom Jaine, at the food journal Petits Propos Culinaires, told me—and then to the Middle East, where there were soon so many pirated printings of Middle Eastern Food that you could find it in kitchens from Cairo to Beirut and Damascus, and even Riyadh. By the end of 1970, Jill Norman, the cookbook editor at Penguin, had bought the rights to Middle Eastern Food and published a paperback edition. (“It walked off the shelves,” she told me.) Two years later, her American counterpart, Judith Jones, the editor who discovered Julia Child, published it at Knopf. Roden today counts both women among her best friends, though at the time they were put through their paces at her family dinners (Claudia cooked; Nelly “supervised”), swore to a passion for minced lamb, bulgur wheat, and honey-drenched pastry, and were pronounced relatives. “Nelly was something of a drama queen,” Norman told me, “and the food was very grand.”