Why Claudia has all the right ingredients
THE Ballymaloe Literary Festival is the first festival devoted to culinary writing and literature. It is a ‘who’s who’ of food writing, but at the peak is Claudia Roden. Historian Simon Schama said she “is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Proust was a biscuit baker. She is, rather, memorialist, historian, ethnographer, anthropologist, essayist, poet.”
Roden was born in Cairo in 1936, to a wealthy Jewish merchant family. She left home at 15 to attend school in Paris. On Sundays, she joined relatives for a traditional Arabic bean dish, ful mesdames. It became a family ritual, this peasant dish, the distillation of all “the glories and warmth” of her birthplace. It is a recurrent theme of her work: food as an emotional touchstone evoking time and place.
