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Med is Claudia Roden's late-career book, written in her mid-eighties after sixty years spent documenting the food of the Mediterranean.
She was born in Cairo in 1936 into a Syrian-Jewish family and left Egypt after the Suez Crisis in 1956. In London she began collecting recipes from other exiles, in their kitchens and over the telephone, before the traditions had time to disperse completely. The result was A Book of Middle Eastern Food in 1968, which remains the foundational text on which the entire modern Middle Eastern wave rests, with figures such as Ottolenghi following in its wake to great success.
Then came half a century of work, with The Book of Jewish Food as its monumental centrepiece, alongside dedicated volumes on Spain, Italy and Morocco.
This book does the opposite of what one might expect from a late work. It does not summarise and it does not show off. It gathers what she actually cooks now, the simplest food from a lifetime of travelling, from Provence to Petra and from Madrid to Morocco.
The recipes follow accordingly. Vegetables, olive oil, pulses, yoghurt, herbs and citrus, prepared with few steps. It is summer food in the broadest sense, but it rests on a depth of knowledge that few other cookbooks possess.
The book was named food book of the year by The Times and was nominated for a Fortnum & Mason award.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Ebury Press
ISBN: 9781529108583
Language: English
First published: September 2021
