Claudia Roden

Claudia Roden CBE (née Douek; born 1936) is an Egyptian-born British cookbook writer and cultural anthropologist of Sephardi/Mizrahi descent. She is best known as the author of Middle Eastern cookbooks, including A Book of Middle Eastern Food, The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, and Arabesque Sumptuous Food from Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon. Roden was born in 1936 in Cairo, Kingdom of Egypt, the daughter of Cesar Elie Douek and his wife, Nelly Sassoon.

Her parents were from prominent Syrian-Jewish merchant families who migrated from Aleppo in the previous century; she grew up in Zamalek, Cairo, with two brothers, the surgeon Ellis Douek and Zaki Douek. She was Egypt's national backstroke swimming champion at the age of 15. In 1951 Roden moved to Paris and went to boarding school for three years. In 1954 she moved to London, where she studied painting at St. Martin's School of Art. 

She shared a flat with her brothers Ellis Douek and Zaki Douek. In the London flat, Roden, while preparing the meals for her brothers, started to experiment with cooking. She remembered family recipes from Alphandary, pies with aubergine and spinach, and mint and lamb. Both were foods not often cooked in London in that period, and so finding ingredients in London was an adventure.

She did not return to Egypt for a quarter of a century, well after her family and most of Cairo's Jewish community had been expelled; many of her books reflect her longing for the close communal culture that was lost, especially as expressed in the culinary arts and social occasions associated with them. Besides her numerous cookery volumes, Roden has also worked as a food writer and a cooking show presenter for the BBC.

Food writers and chefs such as Melissa Clark and Yotam Ottolenghi have credited her with playing a large role in introducing the food of Egypt in particular and the Middle East in general to Britain and the United States. Paul Levy classes her with such other food writers as Elizabeth David, Julia Child, Jane Grigson, and Sri Owen, who, from the 1950s on, "deepened the conversation around food to address questions of culture, context, history, and identity." Her many cookbooks, Clark writes, have "produced a genre of works that is at once literary and deeply researched while still being, at heart, practical manuals on how to make delicious meals."