Image: Navaro · CC BY-SA 3.0
A Book of Middle Eastern Food
- Year
- 1968
- Era
- 20th century
- Origin
- UK/Egypt · Middle East
- Language
- English
- Category
- Middle East
A Book of Middle Eastern Food, issued by Nelson in 1968, gathered for the first time in English a comprehensive survey of the cuisines of Egypt, the Levant, Turkey, Iran and North Africa. Drawing on recipes collected from the diaspora of Middle Eastern Jews, Arabs and Armenians, the work reshaped Anglophone understanding of the region's cookery and established a model for the personal, ethnographic recipe book.
Cooking from this book
Mahshi (stuffed vegetables)
Signature dishFew dishes capture the spirit of Claudia Roden's landmark volume quite like mahshi, the family of stuffed vegetables in which courgettes, vine leaves, aubergines and peppers are filled with spiced rice and sometimes minced lamb. Rooted in the Cairene Jewish kitchen of Roden's childhood and threaded through Arab, Turkish and Persian traditions, it embodies the book's great achievement: gathering a scattered culinary heritage and presenting it, for the first time in English, as a coherent and deeply personal whole.
An editorial note on a dish associated with this book, written for The Coquinist. It is not a reproduction of the book's recipe.
