Diana Henry meets...
When I recently wrote about the illness I had earlier this year, Claudia Roden emailed me on the morning the piece appeared. “Dearest Diana,” she said, “I love you very much. I can’t bear what you have been going through. Will you come and eat with me?” It was so forthright, an invitation to ‘eat with’ her being far more profound and touching than one to ‘come for dinner’. I cried.
“I was from rural Northern Ireland. She opened up a window onto a new world”
DIANA
I’ve looked up to Claudia Roden for decades. When I moved to London in the mid-1980s and found her classic, A Book of Middle Eastern Food, in a local bookshop (I had no idea who she was at the time) my life changed. She didn’t just offer recipes and beautiful writing – when I got home, I immediately started to read about coffee in Cairo with Claudia’s aunts, the tinkling spoons, the inlaid silver trays with bowls of jam…
She opened up a window into a whole new world. I was 22 and from rural Northern Ireland but, with Claudia in my bag, I went to the Edgware Road to hunt down Middle Eastern ingredients and eat Arab bread and baba ghanoush. I became interested in a culture and history that was far away from Northern Ireland. Food became my route into other countries long before I could afford to travel. Now I’m standing in the kitchen of her Arts and Crafts house in north London while she explains what she’s made, all of it dishes from her new book, Med.
There are griddled courgettes with mint in a sweet-and-sour dressing, roast peppers, perfect slices of raw salmon with a bowl of sauce vierge, a mix of chopped tomatoes and extra-virgin olive oil gently heated with garlic and herbs.
PORTRAITS: JAMIE LAU/WAITROSE & PARTNERS FOOD, CHRIS TERRY
“We can have two sauces with the salmon, if you like,” she says. “I’ve made a little aioli.” She gives the aioli a stir, thrilled, as all good cooks are, with what’s on her table. The corner of the room where she cooks has Mediterranean tiles on the wall – yellow and blue – to remind her of the warm places she loves: the South of France, Egypt, where she was born, Lebanon, Spain.
Claudia’s parents came from Syrian Jewish merchant families and moved to Cairo because of the cotton trade that opened with the Suez Canal. She loves talking about her childhood in Cairo and, even more so, about Alexandria, as places of ease, warmth, extended family and good food. “It was a particular manner of being, of living, that you don’t know is special until you miss it.” Middle-class women didn’t work – something she hated – but socialised all day while the children were looked after by nannies. She tells you, with joyful, balletic sweeps of her arms, that people of all religions and backgrounds –Arabs, Jews, Armenians, Copts, Greeks, Turks – lived together more or less harmoniously.
Then, with the Suez crisis in 1956, President Nasser began expelling foreigners and Jews.
Claudia had left at 15 to go to boarding school in Paris, then moved to London.