Claudia Roden

Roden's books are respected for their writing as much as for their recipes. Roden always includes ethnography and history of the kitchen and table, genealogy of recipes, dishes and ingredients. She traces the migration of each recipe and adds stories about the process of cooking, etiquette of serving and table manners, as well as the sequence and ritual of the meal. Roden is intensely interested in addressing the continuity of taste, techniques, and combination of ingredients. She often points out how modern cooking methods such as pounding, stuffing and shaping are surprisingly similar to the procedures of our ancestors. Each recipe also contains the story of how Roden attained it and folk tales surrounding the food, often starting with stories of her own childhood. As she says herself, "every recipe tells a story." Roden is best known for her Egyptian approach to Jewish food found in A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968) and her magnum opus The Book of Jewish Food-An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to Present Day (1997). Her other works include The Good Food of Italy-Region by Region (1990), Everything Tastes Better Outdoors (1984), Coffee-A Connoisseur's Companion (1994), Mediterranean Cookery (1992), and The New Book of Middle Eastern Food (2000).