The New Book of Middle Eastern Food

Rating:
Summary: A Delectable Read
Review: Although I've never met the great woman, I can honestly say that I grew up in Claudia Roden's kitchen. My mother adhered to the sacred culinary tenets that Ms. Roden set out in her 'Book of Middle Eastern Food' with religious zeal. The results were (what else?) subime. Yet after twenty years of wear, tear, and the best babaganoush you'll ever taste, we retired our tattered paperback copy of the book to the safety of a ziploc baggie and upgraded to Ms. Roden's 'New Book of Middle Eastern Food.' Here Ms. Roden disproves the old adage about gilding the lily. Enhanced by gorgeous color photos and the author's characteristically unpretentious attitude towards cooking, 'The New Book of Middle Eastern Food' is as much a cookbook as it is a culinary ethnography of the Middle East. The recipes are simple, the ingredients are accessible, and the results are delectable. When you're not cookinng out of this book, you'll probably be enjoying the explanations, comments, and characters to which Ms. Roden introduces us.

Rating:
Summary: Culinary Atlas of Arab, Persian, Berber, and Ottoman Worlds
Review: Claudia Roden is one of the three great ladies of Mediterranean food writing, joining Elizabeth David and Paula Wolfert to make this cuisine one of the best reported centers of food interest in the English speaking world. The three connect in this book by Ms. David's being the avowed inspiration for Rodin's work and by Claudia Roden's citing Paula Wolfert's excellent book on couscous and referring to one of her other major works in the bibliography. It is also worth noting another literary connection in that the Alfred A. Knopf editor for this book is the acclaimed Judith Jones, the editor for Julia Child's landmark first books on French cuisine. While all of that makes this a noteworthy book with 'good connections', it is not what makes the book worth buying.

As the title suggests, this book is a new and greatly revised edition of a volume first published in 1968. In this edition, much academic material, i.e. recipes derived from translations of old historical documents has been replaced and augmented by newer material from the Middle East. Ms. Roden clearly states that this is not a work of scholarship, but one should not take from that the feeling that these recipes are not the real thing. I am certain that like Ms. Wolfert, they are genuinely Middle Eastern recipes, made useable by the modern American or English cook.

The meaning of 'Middle Eastern' in the title may not be exactly what a geographer or historian may mean by 'Middle Eastern' or roughly from Turkey to Egypt to Iran. Ms. Roden means primarily the region covered by the greatest advance of the Muslim rule and influence in the European Middle ages. Her four principle regions of concentration are:

The earliest and 'the most exquisite and refined' is that of Persia, now Iran. This is 'the ancient source of much of the 'haute cuisine' of the Middle East'. This is the route by which rice from India passed into the Middle East and the West.

The second region is roughly the Arab lands now formed into the states of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. This is where Arab food is at it's best. This includes the Fertile Crescent, which is actually in modern Iraq.

The third region is Turkey, or more broadly, the area influenced by the former Ottoman Empire. This presence had its influence most felt in Europe, especially the Balkans, Hungary, Greece, Russia, North Africa, and even Austria and France. This is the source of kebabs, savory pies, yogurt salads, and paper-thin dough.

The fourth style is the cuisine of North Africa, extending as far West as Morocco on the Atlantic coast of Africa. The strongest native influence here is in couscous from the Berber nomads who collaborated with the Arabs in conquering southern Spain. This region also retains some of the strongest echoes of the cuisines of ancient Persia and Baghdad.

The recipes are divided by the type of central ingredient in dishes, but certain ingredients, most especially olives and olive oil, yogurt, citrus fruits, bulgar wheat, rice, eggplant, and lamb pervade all sections. I was just a bit surprised to find that like the Indian cuisine, clarified butter plays a large role as the 'lipid of choice' in this region, keeping parity with olive oil in most regions.

The recipe sections in this book are:

Appetizers, Salads, and Cold Vegetables such as Stuffed Grape Leaves, Falafel, and Baba Ghanouj
Yogurt, including very simple instructions on how to make yogurt at home
Savory Pies including Tagine Malsouka, Spanakopitta, and many other Filo based pies
Soups, including those of lentils, chickpeas, fava beans, spinach, and carrots
Egg Dishes, featuring omelets very similar to the Italian frittata or Spanish tortilla
Fish and Seafood, including marinades, kebabs, and North African seafood
Poultry, featuring pigeons, squabs, quail, ducks, and many varieties of chicken dishes
Meat Dishes featuring lamb, the famous shish kebab, moussaka, meatballs, and sweetmeats
Vegetables, featuring artichokes, spinach, zucchini, eggplant, okra, sweet potatoes, and chickpeas
Rice, featuring pilafs and rice with favas, dates, yogurt, chickpeas, cherries, lentils, and rhubarb
Bulgur, Couscous, and Pasta featuring bulgar pilafs, methods for making couscous, and noodles
Breads, featuring pita, pita, and pita
Desserts, Pastries, and Sweetmeats featuring citrus fruits, apricots, nuts, cherries, dates, and baklawa
Pickles and Preserves featuring preserved lemons, pickled vegetables, chili and tomato sauce
Jams and Fruit Preserves featuring citrus, peaches, walnuts, pumpkins, figs, quinces, and eggplant
Drinks and Sherbet featuring Lemonade, Laban (Yogurt Drink), coffee, tea, almond milk

As one may expect, New World vegetables are present, but not as pervasive as in Italian cuisine.

One can see much of this food at the heart of the perceived to be healthy 'Mediterranean Cuisine' plus echoes in raw food preparation and in the cuisines of such luminaries with a Mediterranean background such as Eric Ripert. This book did exacerbate my confusion over the term 'Meze'. The Greek food expert Diane Kochilas states that it refers only to small dishes served with ouzo and other alcoholic beverages separate from sit down meals. Roden confirms the connection with ouzo but identifies it with dishes opening a meal. I guess it depends on which country you talk to. Sigh.

This book is a certifiable classic, especially for those interested in food in general or in Middle Eastern food in particular. The bibliography is an excellent jumping off point for exploring this cuisine. Also, the sidebars of Middle Eastern stories are a real hoot. You will not be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: The Best
Review: I decided not to duplicate the heavy American tradition of the Thanksgiving dinner this Christmas. A good substitute seemed to be to go to the source of Christmas: the Middle East. I checked Claudia Roden's book out of the library. At home, I already had other books with this type of cuisine - Armenian, North African, and the slightly variant Italian - all full of luscious photography which is lacking in Roden's book. In spite of that, in comparing the recipes, many of which were duplicated in the various books, hers were almost always the best. I have been in Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia, and know authenticity when I see it. Her explanations are detailed, yet clear. If you follow them, you will wind up with results that I feel confident would be applauded in the countries of origin, countries where food preparation and consumption is almost a mystical experience.

For those reasons, I am going to break down and buy the book myself. I can't bear to lose it to the library. I am giving it 4 stars instead of 5 only for one reason. In my opinion, a cookbook can't be truly complete without a great deal more pictures than are in this book. (It has 491 pages of text and 24 pages of pictures.) If you have been to the countries where these recipes arose, your mind will remember how those dishes looked that you sampled there. Otherwise, you'll need a few supplementary picture books - or make the dishes blind and with confidence that by following the instructions, the results will be right.

PS - the Christmas dinner was extremely well received. It was served as a buffet and was unusually easy entertaining due to the large number of cold dishes in this cuisine which could be prepared in advance.

Rating:
Summary: More than a cookbook, it's a treasure!
Review: I lived in and travelled thru the Middle East and North Africa for 7 years, and I've been able to find all my favorite dishes (or variations of them) in this book. These days I'm no longer a vagabond but a homebound mommy. I've discovered that this book offers quick, simple, and inexpensive recipes using fresh ingredients. It'a diet which is as delicious as it is healthy. Claudia Roden is to Middle Eastern cooking what Marcella Hazan is to Italian cuisine and Madhur Jaffrey to Indian food. Buy this book - you'll love it!!!

Rating:
Summary: all my fav middle eastern recipes!
Review: I lived in the Middle East for 3 years and grew to love Egyptian, Turkish, Moroccan, and Arabian foods. I ordered 5 middle eastern cookbooks including this Roden volume(to add to my collection which includes 3 others) when I ordered a tagine cooker from Amazon. I could have only ordered this one! It has everything: explanations of ingredients, easy ways to cook and serve the dishes, and my fav recipes.
I was so surprised to see its comprehensiveness. It had the wonderful snake pastry (snake shape, not ingredient!) of Morocco, and gave ingredient amounts befitting a party crowd. Favorite tagine lamb dishes, boreks, kibbie (kibbeh), yogurtlu-steeped meat dishes called to mind many delightful authentic culinary experiences. I even laughed to read both stories I had been told about the dish which killed the priest. And I learned new ones, ie the Sultan's dish story.
I was also delighted by the tone of the book, comments, adjustments for the modern kitchen, and the stories included in the pages. Mullah Nazruddhin Hoja tales have been a standard in my household, and the inclusion of some of his snippets are being relished.
A Persian poet once said: If I have but two dollars, let me use one to buy a loaf of bread to feed my body and the other for a hyacinth to feed my soul. This cookbook has both cuisine - sensual Arabic foods for the body and stuff for the soul.
Need one Middle Eastern cookbook? This is the one! Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Thick and full of goodness
Review: I love the format of this book. It has white pages with black ink on them. The formatting is simple. Clean text on clear pages make for an easy to read cookbook. Too many books have glossy paged full color backgrounds that do nothing but make them hard to read and push up the cost.

The best part about this book is that it has lots of recipes. You get your moneys worth out of it for that sole reason.

Rating:
Summary: "Mary Smith's Book of European Food"?
Review: I question the usefulness of whole region cookbooks in general. Imagine a cookbook with a title like my review title. Would the author really be conversant with all the techniques and ingredients of the European continent?

In the case of Ms. Roden, there is the additional problem that her memories of Cairene food are dusty; in some recipes she confesses she had never heard of the dish when she had lived in Egypt. Ms. Roden also depends on ingredients she has at hand (in London apparently). As a result she recommends items one can now buy fresh in America. One example is the pomegranate paste she uses in Persian Fesenjun. Iranian cooks make their own juice with fresh pomegranates; we can buy 100% pomegranate bottled juice from California.

Many recipes have not changed from her original Middle Eastern Cooking book. That would be a good thing if the originals reflected traditional recipes but I am afraid what we are often left with are 1950-60's versions of dishes from ex-patriot wives in the Middle East or Westernized takes from immigrant Arabs. I don't know how often Ms. Roden checks in with the current kitchens and families of the Arab world today.

I treasure the recipes she passes on from Middle Eastern Jewish families. Her comments on Islamic customs, however, are less than flattering and downright maddening. The Middle East constantly at war? And this supposed state of perpetual conflict has produced the cuisine? How people forget. Our short history on this continent has been one of constant war, with others and between ourselves. And did the Civil War produce a special cuisine? No need for war to spread good cooking ideas and tastes around; that's what traders and travellers have always done.

For more credible culinary history of the region, I recommend Ayla Algar's books, especially "Classical Turkish Cooking for the American Kitchen"(Harper Collins Pub.). Algar's cookbook titles are curiously missing from Roden's bibliography, while hard-to-find books on Turkish food published in Istanbul are included.

I like the Mulla jokes, even though some of them are completely lost in translation.

Rating:
Summary: Deliciously different but you must like garlic!
Review: I think I've made about a dozen recipes so far, rating all of them "good" to "wonderful." But just about every recipe has garlic. Not a problem for me, because I love garlic, but it might be for you. Otherwise, the recipes are easy to execute and very tasty.

Rating:
Summary: An exeptional book
Review: I was really satisfied with this book. It is packed full of information about the Middle East and it is addictive to read, filled with a plethora of information and recipes[ literally hundreds of them].The organisation of the book is beautiful and never bores you.The recipes are really tasty and varied as the land itself. From the fragrant stews of Marocco on to the luxurius Francophoenician cuisine of Lebanon, the fiery tastes of Tunisia and the Imperial flavours of Persia.I have tried many recipes, and all were very good.Not one of them dissappointed me.There are simple step by step instructions and even an introduction to each dish.Why then 4 stars? To start with there are only a few photographs in the book.To finish, many recipes are presented as Turkish, while in fact they are Greek, Armenian or Syrian.A trivial thing to some but historical accuracy is important to me.

Rating:
Summary: Easy, Authentic, Authoritative
Review: If there is one Middle Eastern cookbook to buy, this is the one!It's one of the best cookbooks I have. The recipes are easy to follow and the collection is comprehensive. Being from the Middle East, I know that the recipes in there are authentic, turn out well, and she uses the healthiest possible route to make delicious Middle Eastern food. I was amazed that she had recipes in there for food my Egyptian mother made at home, but also very exotic (to me) dishes from Morocco, etc.