A word from Claudia Roden

"Roden is... a painstaking researcher, and a brilliant cook whose books get to the heart of every cuisine on which her focus falls. She is a weaver of stories that evoke the past of a nation. She might disavow being an academic, but, by showing us so many peoples through what they eat, she has become a great historian." Elfreda Pownall - The Daily Telegraph

Claudia Roden is my Middle-Eastern guru - well everybody's Middle-Eastern guru really, as, through her book, A Book of Middle Eastern Food, which was published back in the 60s, the western world was turned on to Middle-Eastern food. Well so say many food writers, and I would heartily agree with them. She has also written books on other cuisines - Italian, Spanish, Jewish - all of them learned, painstakingly researched and informative, as well as one on outdoor food - my favourite - Picnic. But I do believe that her great love is the Middle-Eastern, specifically Egyptian, cuisine with which she grew up.

So today I am uninspired and turning to my 'A word from ...' series. It's actually quite difficult to find an apposite quote from Claudia Roden in her introductions. She is severely practical and most of them simply explain how the book is set out, with a little bit about how the people of the cuisine she is talking about deal with their food. But I found a couple of little bits in one of her later books, Arabesque, which features the cuisines of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon. So here they are. Lazy I know, but we have days like this. And you really, really, really, should get at least one of her books. My favourites are Picnic, Arabesque and A Book of Mediterranean Food.

"In the 1960s, when I began researching the cooking of the Middle East and North Africa, the dishes were entirely strange in this country. Now they are fashionable and some have been adopted as our own."

"Trust your taste and allow yourself a certain freedom in the preparation of the dishes. This is in the spirit of these cuisines which, although faithful to tradition, have no absolute rules and are rich in variations and poor in precision. You are told to 'weigh with the eye' and to taste as you go along. And that is what cooking is about. We are dealing with products of nature and these vary. You can have a small lemon that has more juice and is sharper than a larger one. Garlic cloves vary in size and flavour; there are many varieties and they can be young or old and more or less strong. Many of the vegetables available to us come from different countries and are grown in different soils, under a different sun. They have a different taste and respond differently to cooking. Rice, even of the same variety and the same provenance, varies from one year to the next, depending on whether it is new or old, in the amount of water it absorbs. Once upon a time the recommendation for many rice recipes (also those using flour) was to add 'as much water as it takes' and there was much sense in that."

Here is her recipe for dukkah. Start with that.

DUKKAH

This recipe makes a huge quantity. I usually halve it and it still makes masses. It keeps quite well in a jar though and you can use it for all sorts of things besides dipping bread and olive oil into. Try coating fish, or chicken with it. Or anything else really.

500g sesame seed

250g coriander seed

125g hazelnuts

125g ground cumin

salt and pepper to taste - try 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Roast or grill the ingredients separately. Process them all together - BUT - run the blender for a very short time only, as otherwise the oil from the too finely ground seeds and nuts will form a paste. Use the pulse option rather than the constant one. It should be a crushed dry mixture and definitely not a paste.