Fatemah Farag reads a common history bound in tamarind and orange blossoms "This is not a book on Jewish cooking!" scoffed my American mother indignantly, as she flicked through the volume before her. "This is a book about Middle Eastern food!" This is a common reaction to Claudia Roden's latest work, though the title would seem at once to entertain the charge and to contradict it: The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York. My mother happened to have stumbled on a selection of Sephardi recipes. Perhaps she was right. After all, how can meloukhia, a green soup indigenous to the Middle East and particularly associated with Egyptian cuisine, be considered (of all things) "Jewish"? Equally disturbing for me was the experience of hunting the book down on a trip to the States a few months ago. As I prowled through the bookstores of Washington DC and New York, I came across countless books on what was obviously Middle Eastern cuisine filed on shelves labelled in large letters, "Jewish Cooking". When I talked about reviewing this book with my colleagues, we were struck by how taboo the whole subject felt. Political correctness -- on both sides of the divide -- has long obliterated any acknowledgment of common history; whence so many crude attempts to appropriate recipes as if they belonged to only a single people's story. For to study food is to come to terms with a whole society. And it is politics -- the creation of Israel, the many wars of the ensuing Arab-Israeli conflict, the occupation of Palestine and the continuing violence against the Palestinian people -- that constantly gets in the way to prevent us reaching a clear understanding of what Egyptian society was like before the Tripartite Aggression of 1956. A time when the Jews were an integral part of "us". Roden's book, which received this year's James Beard Foundation Cookbook of the Year award, stands against the ravages of modern history. It is less a cook book than a literary tapestry, in which food and memory are equally important ingredients. It tells a story which embraces not only the kitchens of the Jewish communities of Cairo, Baghdad and Aleppo, but the texture of social life, there and in many other countries spanning the divide between Asia and Europe. "At 16 Woodstock Road it seemed that we had never left Cairo," Roden writes of her parents' house in London. "The smell of sizzling garlic and crushed coriander seeds in the kitchen, or of rose water in a pudding, and my mother's daily meals reinforced the feeling." Roden was born and raised in Cairo. It was a cosmopolitan life, centred in Zamalek amongst an affluent and privileged French-speaking community. "When I look through the old notes and recipes given by relatives and friends soon after they left Egypt," she remembers, "it rekindles memories of our old life in a vivid way... There is 'kobeba Latifa', 'fromage blanc Adele', 'Hamud Sophie'...." Her two grandfathers came from Aleppo, Syria, and her great-grandfather Haham Abraham ha Cohen Douek was the chief rabbi of the city. One prized family heirloom is a photo of the Haham wearing medals given to him by the Sultan Abdel-Hamid II. But she also inherited from him a recipe for kibbeh : "Their cooking was Aleppan. It was considered the pearl of the Arab kitchen -- refined and delicate... Their crowning glory was kibbeh, which was a world in itself, with dozens of varieties. Basically, it had an outer shell of pounded wheat and meat, and a spicy meat-and- onion filling. The apartment [of her paternal grandfather in Sakakini] resounded constantly with the ring of the metal pestle and mortar with which they pounded the meat and wheat. It smelled of mint and spices and sizzling lamb, of tamarind and orange blossom." Roden and her family belonged to a community, based in Cairo and Alexandria, which had its roots in Egypt, even as it absorbed waves of immigrants from many different places. "We gave ourselves the fictional bane of 'Basramite' to characterise our mixed backgrounds. There were the Arabised inhabitants of the Haret Al-Yahoud -- the Jewish quarter of Cairo, which we called the hara or simply le quartier, and which was built as early as 389 -- and of the equally ancient Souq Al-Samak (fish market) in Alexandria." In the 16th century the descendants of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula arrived, and later in the 19th century they were joined by Jews from Salonika, Smyrna, Istanbul, the Balkans and North Africa. Already in the Middle Ages, there were immigrants from Yemen and North Africa, and even a few Ashkenazim, escapees from the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. Not to mention the Italians, the Iraqis or the Syrians... The stories of these people are interwoven with the 800 or so recipes Roden has compiled. "Part of the appeal for me of working on this book is that there is more to Jewish food than cooking and eating. Behind every recipe is a story of local traditions and daily life in far-off towns and villages. It is a romantic and nostalgic subject which has to do with recalling a world that has vanished." And so a recipe for Semolina and Coconut Sabbath Cake of the Bene Israel, a cake eaten for breakfast on Saturday by the Jews in India, Riso coi Carciofi (rice with artichokes), a dish originating in the Venice Ghetto, Khoreshte Gheimeh (meat and yellow split pea sauce for rice), a favourite of the Iranian community, and Agneau aux Feves Vertes et aux Amandes (lamb with fresh fava beans and almonds), an ancient Berber dish served between Purim and Pesah in Morocco, all come together to define the mosaic that is Jewish history. Yet Roden herself has also grappled with the question as to whether these recipes can truly be defined as "Jewish food". In the introduction to this cookbook, she quotes from a paper she gave at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 1981: "There is really no such thing as Jewish food. What is familiar here [in England] as Jewish food is totally unknown to the Jew of Egypt, Morocco and India. Local regional food becomes Jewish when it travels with Jews to new homelands." She goes on to explain that since Jews started coming out of the Middle East, India and Georgia in the mid-1950s, they brought with them what is to Ashkenazi cooking a "bewildering range of 'Jewish' dishes". After much research, Roden has concluded that "Jews have adopted the foods of the countries they lived in, but in every country their cooking has had a special touch and taste and characteristic features and some entirely original dishes, which have made it distinctive and recognisable." She goes on to explain that the need for recipes to comply with Jewish dietary law (with its prohibition on combining meat and dairy foods, as well as the refusal of pork and seafood) and the centrality of food to religious festivals which themselves come with specific dietary requirements (for example, at Passover no leavening agents may be used) have also helped give certain foods their Jewish character. Further, Roden argues that "[T]here was always, even centuries ago, a touch of otherness in Jewish cooking, a cosmopolitanism which broke even through ghetto walls," and which reflects a long tradition of mobility across nations and borders. According to the Bible, the Jews longed for the foods they left behind in Egypt, and fava beans were one of the foods they hankered for the most during their Exodus. Roden therefore provides a Moroccan version of the recipe for bessara -- "eaten at Passover, because 'that is what the Hebrews ate in Egypt'". She notes that bessara has been a basic Egyptian food ever since the time of the Pharaohs. It continues to be a main staple of low-income households, and is also a particular favourite of my husband's. And while we all consume copious amounts of the green paste, we remain oblivious to the fact that we share our bessara passion with a significant part of the Jewish people. Perhaps that's why, when I close the book and turn to fry the onions we sprinkle on our bessara, that I realise that Roden rekindles nostalgia where you feel it the most -- in the pit of your stomach.
