This is the London Review of Books podcast.

Today we have the last of three guest episodes from Myself with Others, a new podcast presented

by our US editor, Adam Schatz.

In this episode, he's talking the food writer, Claudia Rodin.

Born in 1936 in Cairo, Rodin was raised in a Jewish family with roots in Aleppo and Istanbul,

where her ancestors were spice merchants.

She left Egypt as a teenager to attend school in Paris and then studied at St. Martin's College in London, where

she's lived since the mid-1950s. In 1968, Rodin published one of the most influential

cookbooks of the post-war era, a book of Middle Eastern food. That book revolutionized British

dining, introducing households to the pleasures of tahini,

pomegranate molasses, sumac, zatar, bulgar, and rosewater.

The fact that she accomplished this in the land of fish and chips in Yorkshire pudding is itself almost miraculous.

But Rodin was always much more than a cook, or rather she's

always seen cooking in the much broader context of culture and history. Each recipe

tells a story, she's often said, and her books are full of stories about collective

memory, displacement, migration, and identity. In 1996, she published what is widely regarded as her masterpiece,

16 years in the making the product of travel in 15 countries,

the Book of Jewish Food, which led Simon Shama to compare her to Proust.

Like the Lebanese novelist Amin Malouf, who himself grew up in Cairo, she's one

of the great elegists of the cultures of the Levant. Her work has earned her great admiration

and many prizes, including the 1996 Prince Klaus Award, given in recognition of outstanding

achievements in the fields of culture and development. I've been cooking rodents' dishes for many years, and about a decade ago, I had the great

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