 by the SOAS Office of Development and Alumni Relations and the SOAS Food Studies Center. I am Harry West, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Food Studies Center here at SOAS. Before we introduce our speaker, I'd like to say just a few words about the center. The SOAS Food Studies Center is an interdisciplinary center dedicated to the study of the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of food historically and in the present. The center's primary purposes are to promote research and teaching in the field of food studies at SOAS and to facilitate links between SOAS and other individuals and institutions with an academic interest in the study of food. The center fosters the teaching of food-related courses in the school and facilitates the supervision of food-related MA dissertations and PhD theses. Principle among food-related course offerings is the MA in the Anthropology of Food, which is a one-year taught master's degree, offering students the opportunity to explore historically and culturally viable foodways from foraging to industrial agriculture from Europe and North America to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The program traces the passage of food from plant to pallet and examines who benefits and who suffers from contemporary modes of food production, exchange, preparation, and consumption. The center also supports individual and collaborative research on food-related topics undertaken by SOAS, staff, and students through the establishment of research networks, the hosting of national and international workshops, and conferences on food-related issues, and also the facilitation of fundraising efforts to support such events, or such initiatives, rather. Additionally, the center organizes the SOAS Food Forum, which includes a weekly seminar series in terms one and two, and also distinguished lectures. Tonight's lecture comes under the banner of the SOAS Food Forum. Last summer, in my role as chair of the center, I had the great privilege of delivering the citation for the award of honorary fellow of the school to tonight's speaker, Claudia Rodin. Rather than introducing her again tonight, I've asked someone far more qualified than myself to do so. Sammy Zuveda is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck College and Professorial Research Associate of the SOAS Food Studies Center. He's a renowned authority on Middle Eastern politics, nationalism, and religion and law, author of Law and Power in the Islamic World, Islam, the People in the State, and Beyond Islam. And he's also co-editor, along with Richard Tapper, of A Taste of Time, Culinary Cultures of the Middle East. And it's because of his extensive knowledge of food and food ways in the Middle East that I've asked him to introduce tonight's speaker. But just before I hand over the podium to Sammy, I just want to remind you that there'll be a reception after tonight's event to which you are all invited. It will be on the ground floor of this building in the Brunei Gallery Suite. I'll say a bit more about that at the end of Claudia's lecture. So, Sammy. Well, it's my great pleasure and honor to introduce Claudia Rodin to this wonderful turn out, I see her fame is obviously well-established and I don't need to emphasize it here. And I'm happy to introduce her as someone who's an old friend and sharing common interest in food cultures and Middle Eastern food in particular. Claudia is the doyen of Middle East food writing and a most renowned and honored figure in the world of food writing and broadcasting. Author of numerous books, many of them are on display and sell out in the foyer. All best sellers, starting with the now canonical book of Middle Eastern food, first published in 1968, followed by many editions, then books on picnic, coffee, Italian food, then the much celebrated book of Jewish food in 1997 and just now the food of Spain, widely acclaimed. She also had many TV program, press articles, lectures and demonstrations, widely appreciated and she's the recipient of many prizes and honors, including the prestigious James Beard Award. What distinguishes Claudia's writing, in addition to the meticulous recipes and ideas, is the cultural, historical and human frame that she provides. These are intermingled with her autobiographical memoirs and reminiscences. One reviewer remarked that Claudia's life reads like a Graham Greene novel. From her original home in Cairo to exile and education in Paris to London, her ultimate home. These contexts and locations have provided the background and inspiration for her writing. I shall always recall the passage in the introduction to the 1968 Middle East book in which she describes so vividly a meal among other Egyptians in Paris of full mudammas, which is a stewed father beans, a kind of Egyptian national dish, very simple eaten by poor and rich alike, dressed in oil and topped with a boiled egg, eaten with silent reverence to the last crumb, nostalgia and appetite combined. This longing of exile is a stimulus for much cultural and historical research and gathering of recipes facilitated by her engaging and sympathetic manner. The book of Middle East food, for instance, is introduced by 60 pages of memoir, history, ethnography and many anecdotes. The Jewish book includes extensive accounts of the history and culture of Jewish diaspora communities in different parts of Eskinazim, of Sephardim and of Oriental Jews. And apart from being an excellent food book, it's a substantial contribution on Jewish communities. The book on Spain is similarly imbued with history and culture. So together with you, I now look forward to hearing Claudia talk about tales of these contexts and encounters. Thank you, Claudia. Thank you very much, Harry, for inviting me to come. Well, for inviting me, well, for the fellowship and for tonight. And thank you very much, Sami, for inviting me. By the way, Sami, a lot of his thoughts and his even recipes are in the books because he's also one of the people who keeps me on my toes by being critical. Well, and thank you all for coming. People always ask me, well, I was asked to talk about my life, which is always a little bit embarrassing. But then, as my brother said, he said, well, you talk about your life anyhow in your book. So there's no need to be embarrassing. But I was thinking on coming, well, that people always ask me, why did I start writing about food? And so I looked at my introduction, an introduction that I wrote almost half a century ago. And it was part of it says that the book, that is the Middle Eastern book, was the joint creation of numerous Middle Easterners who, like myself, were in exile. That it was the fruit of the nostalgic longings for and delighted savorings of a food that was the constant joy of life in a world so different from the Western one. Now, you can laugh if you want. But, well, I began collecting recipes in the late 50s in London. I was here studying art. I had come after boarding school in Paris. And I was sharing a flat with my two brothers. At that time, there were no Lebanese restaurants, no Turkish restaurants. We used to frequent the black cat. Any of you know the black cat in Charlotte Street, where we used to have kebabs and vine leaves and hummus, and the kind of things that we now have everywhere in all our supermarkets. I had to go and do my shopping in Camden Town. There was a Mrs. Harrell, also a Cypriot grocer, to buy things like bulgur, vine leaves, tahina, rose water. And in Kentish Town, there was a place where you could buy phyllo and kadai that was homemade by them. Or rather, they were artisans. And we would go and we would stand there while they pulled out the phyllo pastry over a kind of table with a heat source underneath. So they would pull the dough and it would set right away. And I just remember going there and what a big thing it was. Well, it doesn't seem that long ago, but it was. And it was by 19... I came to London actually, it was 1954. And in 1956, after the Swiss crisis, when the Jews had to leave in a hurry, my parents followed us in London. And this is when my mother, who had a cook, she had a nanny, I had an Italian nanny who would cook for us children Italian dishes when we were very small. But somehow, even though my mother, my grandmother, my aunts, they all had cooks, they also, of course, had to know how to cook because they taught the cooks how to cook because the cooks were all people from the villages, from Upper Egypt, from different parts who would come, who didn't have really any knowledge of cooking. And so the people, the employed, taught them how to cook and they stayed. They stayed, actually, in my case, they stayed until we had to leave or my parents had to leave because I had left before to go to school in Paris. So when my mother came, she was at a loss of what to do with herself because in Egypt, we had this very big extended family and they could always go out and play cards and do petit-poins, meet each other. They were always out. But so all of a sudden to arrive in England with nothing much to do, she threw herself into cooking and to my father's delight. And so it was somehow with a great passion that she would somehow bring out dishes, even some that the cook didn't make. But it also inspired me in that she was always telling me every day I was working at Al Italia by then, but we discussed everything she was making. It was a big deal and I was taking notes. Well, for about 10, almost 20 years, I was living at first with my parents in London and then I had my own family nearby. We were all living, my brothers and myself, just a few minutes from each other in my paints in gold as green, myself in Hampstead Garden suburb. But for a long time, we kept receiving waves of Jews from Egypt, Jews from Egypt who just arrived, who just arrived and they had just a few weeks to leave. And also over time, people who hadn't decided where to settle and were stopping in London. So I felt for quite a while that I thought I had left behind a lot of people and then in the end, they came back to me and that I had little Egypt, little Cairo in gold as green and the smells of the cooking and the talking. My parents went on talking about everybody in Egypt that they knew and they would retell the stories every day in a different way. So we knew all the sides, the different size of everybody's life. And I suppose that's something that, in a way I'm telling stories because I missed all this storytelling that they weren't the only ones to do that everybody else did as well because Gossip was one of the interesting entertainments there. But what happened then that all these people that came over to England where I found exchanging recipes. Even men who before would never talk about food, they wanted good food and they kept their wives on their toes. They kept telling me that they didn't give too many, well, they didn't encourage them too much because they wanted them to keep trying harder. They never told them something was perfect. But here all of a sudden they were telling me, you know, I was in Switzerland, I was in this club, I met this man who knew how to make lahmabeh gene. I was in the queue of the cinema and somebody gave me this recipe. So for me at that time all these, it was like gold dust that people were finding recipes and they were exchanged in a kind of desperation almost. It was as because we were never going to see each other, perhaps, and we might never see Egypt again but at least we'll have something to remember each other by if we give each other recipes. And so some of them came out with little notebooks because the recipes were family notebooks, recipes were handed down in the family, people were jealous and didn't give them to others but now we were not in competition anymore. So we wanted to record really. We wrote to our Muslim friends in Egypt saying, is there any cookbook that you could send us? And the only one that came, I got a very big paperback and I couldn't read it easily. And so my father started reading and what it was, it was actually a book that was translation of an English book that the British army had left behind. And you know, it was macaroni cheese, cauliflower cheese, roly-poly a la castarda. So you see, well, so I really had somehow my, I just felt, no, we have to find. Now I became an obsessed collector of recipes and cooking tips and I just, everybody that I met, I just couldn't miss the occasion to say, what do you cook? And then how do you salt your aubergines? Do you sprinkle them with salt, put them, do you put them in salted water? Do you put them, and do you fry or bake your sambusak? And people who were giving me recipes somewhere saying, you know, because they weren't food writers and they didn't have correct measures, they would say, you put as much flour as it takes and I would say, how could you know how much it takes? And so one person told me, look, while you're doing the dough, you keep adding flour and working it and at the same time touch the lobe of your ear. When it feels like the lobe of the ear, it's how it should take. So that was the thing. Now, for me also collecting was a way of keeping in touch with people and I was asking everybody, who do you know who makes a good natif? Who makes a good melochella? Who makes the best? I was always trying to find the best kibbeh. And so I was asking, where are they? Any addresses? Any phone numbers? And so I was writing all these letters all over the world asking them, how do you make butarga? How do you make natif? But actually it was not just to get a recipe but it was also a way of keeping in touch. Finding out who they are, where are they? And in a way, because we were wrenched all of a sudden from people who had been, we thought part of our, going to be part of our lives forever and somehow it was a way of keeping some contact. But years later, when I went on a book tour to the United States in the days when they sent you all over the country, I would do book signings in bookshops or sometimes in Jewish community centers. But in this case it was in bookshops and I went with somebody from the publishers and after a while we realized that or almost everywhere I went, there was always somebody there who smiled too much from the start. Even there was no reason to smile. And then at the end, somebody, they would come up and from the thing they say, don't you remember me? I'm your aunt. And you see? And then or else I sent you the recipe for butarga. Don't you remember? But you see it was a long time ago and we were all gray, gray before we started dyeing our hair. But what was I, but what I was collecting was a mixed bag. In Egypt, in my time, it was a mixed cosmopolitan society. It was the time of King Farooq and I saw in Gamal Abdel Nasser's revolution. We even had his little book by the door in case somebody came in, which showed them. And one of my uncles had his, had a bust of Gamal in his, he had a wholesale place in the bazaar and it was there at the door. And well, Egypt was, I suppose now everybody does know, they had long established communities of Syrians and Lebanese, Greeks, Italians, Armenian, as well as the French and British expatriates. And living amongst the Muslim and Coptic population. The royal family was an Ottoman Albanian dynasty. The aristocracy was Turkish and the Jewish community itself was a mosaic of people from Syria, Turkey, the Balkans, North Africa, Greece, Iraq, Iran. They had all been attracted to Egypt at the time of the building of the Suez Canal soon after and when Egypt was the El Dorado of the Middle East or the Dubai, I would say, of the Middle East, I don't know that. But so three of my grandparents came from Aleppo and they came and settled in an area where all the Jews from Syria settled. And it was a new district called Sakakini and that it had been a marshland that had been drained and they all came and lived there. And one of my grandmother's, my maternal grandmother came from Istanbul. Now everyone had their special repertoire of dishes. We had some relatives who were from North Africa and we had, we married into other families. So we did get to eat the different kinds of food when we visited and in a way that is why I ended up covering much of the Middle East and also North Africa because a lot of people tell me, why didn't you just do, if you were nostalgic, why didn't you do just Egyptian food? Because that's not what we were. We were quite a big mixture. And yes, somebody complained, I don't know if he's here today, but he complained, I think where it was, I'm not quite sure. But he complained that I was responsible for this mess of people calling Middle Eastern food because there's no such thing, you know? But actually it was, as Sami said, a genre. But the fact is that for us, that's what we had. We had all of this. Now, most of the people who gave me recipes at the time were my mother's age, which was 45. Seemed like a lot to me at the time. But they all told me that the recipes came from their mothers or their grandmother or their mother-in-law. And that tells you how old the recipes are. And they still are the way people cook today. I don't know for how long, still more. Now, a lot of men in my family also gave me, wanted me to write things down. And they were telling me stories. My uncle, Musadouac, came from Egypt. He stayed on much longer than the other people. And he made a big collection of proverbs. And some people told me jokes and stories. And I wrote down everything. I've got all these notes in French. Well, we were very Europeanized. We spoke French at home. And we spoke Italian with our Slovene Italian nanny. And the English school Cairo where we were, we studied English history and geography. But generations of my family had lived always, as far as we know, in the Arab and Ottoman worlds. And something of their experience, of their knowledge, of their enthusiasm, filtered down. One of my cousins who lives in Paris, he told me, why did you write about food? Or the Middle East, where you're Europeanized? And he said, is it because you love your father so much? Well, well, I don't know. But somehow it was their world, my father's world, and their world that I hardly knew because we were so Europeanized, that fascinated me. And that's what I was trying to capture together with the recipes. Now, the project grew bigger and bigger. I didn't just ask family and friends. I went on collecting. I hung around carpet warehouses, well, Iraqi carpet warehouses, and to meet people. So I had a whole long career of meeting people. And I would go there and they say, do you want to buy a carpet? No, can I meet your wife to ask for recipes? And I would go to embassies, Syrian embassy, Iranian embassy, and they would say, are you here for a visa? I said, no, I'm looking for recipes. So I think now I don't know what the situation is, but at the time it was very peculiar. I hear now that people are going to street, they go to abroad, and all the street vendors are costed by people asking them for recipes. So now maybe recipe collecting has become something. Now, I wanted to look for an Arab cookbook. And so I went to the British Library. I spent a lot of time at the British Library. And I asked for help in finding books on Arab cooking. And the librarian at the time, I wish I had his name because I keep wishing I could thank him properly, but I never did. But he wrote down a list of publications for me to look at. And they were nothing contemporary. One was a 13th century culinary manual found in Baghdad and translated in 1939 by Professor Arbery. It was accompanied by poems of the time celebrating food. Another was a 1949 analysis in a publication of a culinary manuscript, an analysis, the culinary manuscript of the same period by the French Marxist orientalist Maxime Rodinçon. He had found the manuscript in a library in Damascus and he was there during the war. He was in the French army and because they found themselves in Syria because France was occupied, they were made to stay out there. And so he decided to use it for his PhD. And he did this incredible to me analysis where he used the recipes to explain a society that existed more than 700 years ago. So for me, there was also another book that was Maghreb and Elanda Loos. And it was a Spanish translation by Wichimi Randa. Now I was really enthralled by the fact that now I was really enthralled to find all this. For months I entertained my friends to medieval banquets. We were eating medieval foods the whole time. And I found that it was very, very appealing to eat all historic dishes and to know that is how things tasted and smelled and in the past. But for me, also what was particularly exciting was that some of these medieval recipes had the same name or similar names, similar combinations of ingredients and flavorings and similar techniques to those I had been hearing from all those people who were giving me recipes. So that is how I became interested in the history and origins of dishes. I started to look for references, stuffed vine leaves were mentioned in ancient Persia, baklava in Ottoman times. I found elements from ancient Persia like meat cooked with fruit, for instance, in the odd cuisine of the Middle East in our grand dishes and the Jewish grand dishes as well, and especially in North Africa. Well, I spent, so I went out to read about the history of these areas. And I have to say a great deal to the SOAS Library. I don't know how I managed to get books out of the library. I wasn't a member and I wasn't a student, but I kept taking books home. I don't know if anybody now will be able to take books home. But so I have very, very soft spot for SOAS. But for me to read the historical bits and to be able to understand that you can find a dish and the dish is there for a reason in this place. So it was very, for me, a wonderful period. Also, my parents hadn't wanted me to go to university. They would just say, il n'est pas question. Il n'est pas question, you have to be married. Well, they tried, since I was 15, I was engaged. But so it's not just the Indian who tried to get their children married off very early. But well, when I decided after a while to turn all the recipes into a book, and I was telling people and they looked embarrassed and they looked pettingly and they fled. They didn't want to hear anymore. I mean, some people said, because at the time it really wasn't the hot subject it is now. And some people would say, why don't you paint? And then somebody more than once people would say, is it about sheep size and testicles? So I just felt, oh wow, we've got to tell them a bit more. And I did look up at that time what explorers, what people, travelers would say about Middle Eastern food. And I found that the explorer Charles Montague Doughty who traveled in Arabia in 1876, he wrote that lambs sitting on mountains of rice in a sea of fat were what was a food. And he said also that Arabs were better at making love than food. So other British travelers would do the same, would say the same kind of thing. So I think that is the impression that somehow have stayed on into the 1950s and 60s. Well, also the expats, the people who lived in the countries for a while, they always managed not to eat the local food if they possibly could. For instance, I read that Lord, or rather I didn't read, I was told by somebody at the British Library, one of the Egyptologists there, that Lord Carnavan famously had samples, hampers sent to him from Harrods. And that Flinders Petrie was another archeology who couldn't afford Harrods. He lived on tin foods he brought with him. And because the heat, they were dangerous after a while. So it is said that he would throw the tins at the wall and if it exploded, he wouldn't eat it. But so, and in my case, I was very well aware that English people didn't want local food because when, well, the Egyptian cooks in my school, the English school Cairo, Heliopolis, would only make English food. And when I had my friends for tea, I told my mother, please just make scones and jellies. You know, little sandwiches all right. But so this is in a way, because of all this lack of sympathy for that food, I hoped that all the proverbs, riddles, the folk tales, the stories of Goha, by putting them in amongst the recipes, it might make people feel the recipes were more appealing. And that they would see them as part of a civilization that was interesting. Well, that's how I started writing about food, but then it became my way of, well, it became, I never wanted it to be a career, but that's what it's been. And it's been a way of supporting my family. But when my three children, I have three children, when they grew up, while they were at home, we were eating recipes that I was trying the whole time. And one day, I always remember this because I didn't realize what it did to them, but when the two older ones went away to France to stay with relatives, to go with relatives on a holiday, the little one stayed with me and I said, now you're the only one, you tell me what you want to eat. I was a single mother then, quite early on, and she said, please, fish fingers and spaghetti and tins. So I mentioned I bought all the fish fingers and put them in the freezer and there. And, but when the three of them left home, they all left home on the same day because two of them who were older stayed at home during their university years. And when the youngest one went to university in Manchester, the two older ones went to New York for a year. And so, well, I decided the day they leave, I leave too. And I left to travel, I decided around the Mediterranean. And so writing about food, which had been a way of supporting my family, became also a way of discovering the world. And it gave me a reason for traveling alone because, well, as a woman, I was often asked because in a few of the countries in the Mediterranean, people always ask you, where is your husband? Where are your children? And, well, it also allowed me because I had a mission to ask, to accost people and to say, I'm researching food. Can you tell me some things about what you eat? Well, how you do it and all that. Of course, if men accosted me, I would say, in some countries, I've got five children and grandchildren. And that gave me respect on the train in Morocco, for instance, but it didn't always, in Italy, it worked very well. And I would start, it would be a whole, I would start, for instance, I would take a car most of the time, but that's later when I was researching Italy, but I would go on a train and I would quickly look around and I'd just say, I've come to research the food. What do you eat? What do you, you know, what, where are you from? And gradually, the whole of the carriage was drawn into talking about food. And that for me was, you know, it was a wonderful thing. And I'm sure if I did it here on the tube or on the train somewhere, how would I be seen as somebody totally crazy? But I asked her, well, sometimes people invited me to eat and they'd say, well, what about coming home with me? And you can watch me cook and you can eat, which I did. When my children, I was worried about my children saying to them, you know, I'm worried about where you go. You know, because they'd go on holiday with their friends. They'd say, don't you think we're worried about where you go? You know, but of course it didn't always work those techniques of asking people about food. But for instance, in Sardinia, I was at a hunting lodge and the owner was just very suspicious of me. And when I was in the kitchen, because I always asked in places if I could go in the kitchen and watch them cook. And when suddenly she rushed in the kitchen, I hadn't asked her because she wasn't about. And she came in, she said, get out, get out. And then in the dining room, I was the only woman in the dining room, there was a very, very long table of hunters. And the hunters were there to hunt, what do you call it? Wild boar? Yes, wild boar. I was going to say the wild pig, no, the wild boar. And they were singing hunting songs. And after one or two songs, they called me and said, do you want to join us? So I went and she came straight back in and she said, go back to your table and leave tomorrow. So I did go into many kitchens and I love that. And I want to tell you that if you invite people in the kitchen, if you come, it's a place of intimacy where you can open up. It's unlike if they invite you in the living room, it's formal. In the kitchen, they tell you also their problems and you're asked to give advice. They think you're so far away that you can give proper advice. You're not somebody from next door or your relative who has a particular interest in. So for me, part of the pleasure of researching food was to get to know people and to enjoy the special conviviality that is around food because that is what you find. Now, they say that if you are part of the Mediterranean, you're never a stranger on its shores. And yes, I felt at home. Although every country has its own cuisine and the cooking can vary from one city to another, I found the same ingredients, the same utensils, the same techniques, similar dishes, similar sounding names. Now, if you look into the history of the area, you see that it's not surprising at all. And they have an incestuous shared history with the same empires, the same occupiers spreading across the region, the same influences and of course the age-old trading across the sea. Now, in the 1970s, everyone interested in health and food became aware of the research of the American Anselpies who found that Mediterranean diet was healthy. So when the BBC TV director, with whom I had worked on a series on healthy food, heard of my travels, she said, she asked me if I would be involved in the series on the Mediterranean and in writing the book. And they could use, that is how they use the context that I had made in my travels, including going to being there for a wedding in Tetuan. And they realized only after they started filming that they saw only women dancing, eating, cooking. And then they went there to watch them cook first, they were cooking. And then it's only when they, at the end of the wedding they said, where are the men? The men were celebrating in another house. But so well, things happened like that. Now, with Italy, I'm just looking, I'm okay. Oh no, I've spoken too much about that. Well, I have to say with Italy, I was very lucky. And I suppose for me everything was always a matter of chance and of luck. I was asked by The Sunday Times to do a series on, for their magazine, for The Sunday Time Magazine, a series which men too would like to read. So men would like to read if you talk about the history, the background, and the product. And they thought that Italy was the next big thing. And I did go à l'aventure to make my discoveries by chance, but I was very lucky because the first place that I went to was at the great banquet at the Gritti Palace. And we ate on the terrace, overlooking the canal. And the dinner, this great banquet was for chefs who were committed to serving traditional dishes. And the chef next to me had explained to me that Goimio, the guide, the food guide, had decided that they would only mention and put in their books restaurants that did nuvel cuisine, nuova cucina. And so all of a sudden everybody was coming out with risotto tricolore, with strawberries and kiwi and things like that. But so they were, this group of Italian chefs were doing what they call il recupero, la riscoperta creativa. And they were preserving traditional dishes. One of the teachers there, because they always had, they also had cookery teachers, she told me, I'm going to phone somebody and send you to this man in Venice. When you go to Venice, well, I was in Venice, but I had been with her to Friuli because she offered to accompany me on the first trip. And because this was the thing also that people decided to come with me when I was researching. And she phoned this man and he was the president of an association of food lovers called il appassionati di cucina. And so I went to, he met me at the station and he gave me the list of appassionati in every region. They weren't chefs, they were all just ordinary people. In, then I found when I went to, I would call them, he actually called them and said, look after her. And I would go, for instance, when I went to Emilia Romagna, somebody called and I heard that they were part of a confraternity. They were confraternity that was looking after a few dishes or rather some dishes, they would go to restaurants to make sure that they are done in the absolutely perfect way that for instance the golden globules are still on the broth. And very often they weren't because the health and diet brigades were there before and they had asked them to blot them out. But anyway, I found there was 100 such confraternities only in Emilia Romagna. Well, I'll go and say, I'm wondering whether to talk about Egypt, to talk about Jewish food, my experience with Jewish food or about Spain now? Carry on as you are. Anything? Okay, so well in Egypt, Egypt was one of my happiest assignments and I was invited by the Chef's Association to give seminars. And when I asked them what you want the seminars about, they said my brief was what was typical Egyptian food? What was Middle Eastern food? What was the history of Egyptian food? And what should the chefs be cooking for tourists? Now, I realized that when I was there I did travel along the Nile, not on a boat but on trains to stop in different places to also rediscover village foods and street foods and any foods, middle class foods that people could give them ideas about what to serve in restaurants. But so, well, the seminar, just to say in a village in Egypt, I would just walk through and a woman just opened the door and she said, what are you doing? And I said, oh, I'm just walking around. Would you like some tea? And I went inside and I told her I was looking for a recipe. She was making a lentil soup. And then she asked me, where's your husband? I said, he's gone. And I said, where's yours? And with a very big smile, she said, mine died. So, you know, we were during question time. So, I did, the seminar was in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel in Zamaalik that used to be a palace. What's it called? I used to live nearby in Zamaalik and I used to pass it every day going to the park. But anyhow, when someone, after the talk, someone asked in the questions or rather said, there is, we don't have any food that is truly ours. We not, it's either Arab or Syrian or Lebanese or Turkish. The only food we ever had was pharyonic times. And they asked me, do I know any pharyonic food? And luckily I had done some finding out before I came. And many of the most popular foods today were common in the times of the pharaohs. They're featured in tomb paintings, in temple reliefs. They're documented in some of them. I found documents in Greco-Roman times. And in the Bible, in the Exodus. The Exodus was talking about the foods that they used to eat when they were slaves in Egypt. If, now also there was, they found some full medames, beans in clay jars, in the funeral offerings, in the tombs. But now they also have, through the DNA, they've identified particles of food stops. Food stops in the mummies of things they had just, that had eaten. And they did find melochella seeds. Melochella is the great love of Egypt, the national food, this green leaf that is made into a soup with chicken or rabbit or duck. And also full medames. They all had it all along the Nile. And so I just looked at them and said, look melochella. And then somebody said, but the tourists don't like melochella. So what shall we do? Now I did meet somebody doing Newvel cuisine, Egyptian Newvel cuisine. And he was a Lebanese and he had a restaurant in Zamale called Aubergine. And he did a special dinner for myself and a whole lot of people who were there. And it was all a big laugh. I thought we could laugh because I had told him, please don't do Egyptian Newvel cuisine. Actually, maybe if your Tam Otolenghi went, he could do it well. But the kind of things he did, he did a shoe pastry filled with full medames. So I just said no, please. And then I said, but whatever you do, don't do a pyramid. Yes, he did a pyramid. I must say I could laugh because he's one of the richest people in Egypt. I wouldn't do it for somebody who, you know, it wouldn't matter if his restaurant failed. But anyhow it didn't fail. And people did want to go and eat his shoe with full medames, but he probably does. Now Jewish food is a food of vanished wealth, a food without a terroir. It's dishes that people carry in their minds. It's the thing they take as a baggage from one homeland to another. And they adapt the dishes to their quotient laws and they make them part of their rituals and festivities. They are sometimes the result of the fusion of the cooking of two or more homelands. I'd just like to quote a French writer, Edgar Morin, who wrote his also a politician as well as a writer. He was. But he explains in his book, Vidal les Siens, about his Jewish community of Salonica. He explains it, and he says he wrote that gastronomy is the kernel of a culture. And for Salonicans, pastelicos is the kernel of the kernel. For some, he said, pastelicos is all that is left of their culture. So in a way, when I was in New York, in some of the delis where people go and eat and what people call, they are gastronomic Jews now. Now I worked for 16 years on a book on Jewish food. It wasn't easy to look for Jews in old communities. I got a lot of information in London and in Paris. Sami provided a lot of information about the cooking of the Jews of Iraq. And he kept telling me there's no such thing as Jewish food. And then he kept giving me recipes and then saying, I said, did the Muslims eat it? No. And so I was lucky enough that the telegraph sent me to 15 cities to write about the cities and the food there. And I told him, when I told him, no, you know, I've got to finish this book, write this book. And he said, well, take a day, extra day and go and look for Jews. And so well I did. But of course, I embarrassed my relatives. I embarrassed my friends. But I did get contacts before going sometimes. But when I didn't have contacts, well, I would go to the synagogue. In Venice, for instance, I went to the synagogue in the old Jewish quarter in the ghetto. And when I went there, the synagogue, they said, well, go to the old people's home. There are the ladies there who cook for Shabbat. It was about to be Shabbat. And they cook. And he said, look, when I went there, I saw the ladies. And I said, what kind of cooking are you doing? Venetian, Jewish. And they said, well, you know, there are four synagogues in the Jewish ghetto of different denominations. One is German. One is Spanish. One is, what are the synagogues in the ghetto in Venice? There are four different denominations. And there are four different Jewish cuisines in Venice. Now, there were many, many different Jewish cuisines. And so that's one reason why it took so long. But I still went around wanting to find them in their old communities. But for instance, I met a Jewish doctor in London, or he happened at the very end when the day they were leaving, I realized they were Jewish. He was called Henri Boccarat. And he came, he was a neighbor. They rented a house for the Sam holiday. And at the end, I asked his son, about, I think, 12 or 13, and I said, what do you eat? And he said, he said, la cuisine juive, okay. So I took their phone number and all that. And I went to Marrakesh. In fact, they invited me to stay. We exchanged houses at one time. And he had a clinic at the Place de Malphna in Marrakesh. And when I was there, I said, who can you send me to collect recipes? He said, I'll send you to this magic man. When I finished, I can't do anything more to people. I send them to him. And he was in the Medina. So I went to him and I spent three days cooking with the family. They were cooking for Shabbat. And they were making the food. And I went with them on the day to the public bath and well, first to the public oven, because although they had an oven, they never used it. They just covered it with a, I don't know why they got it. And they had a picture on it of Abu Hasira, who was a saintly rabbi buried in Egypt. And there's a pilgrimage there. But they brought all their food to be done in the public oven. But so for me, going about and meeting people, like Denise Kandioti, who is a professor here, gave me her addresses of her relatives in Turkey. And I went and the first place I went to at one of her aunts, they were, I phoned up and they said, come, come, we're playing cards. And I went and they were playing cards, but they were also discussing a play that they were performing of My Fair Lady in Judeo-Spanish. And there was always one extra person in the two card table. And that extra person would come and sit next to me and I would write down the recipes. And there was this recipe from Ismir, a different recipe. There were different recipes from different towns. But when I couldn't have a contact, well, sometimes I was lucky. For instance, I was in the Spice Bazaar and I saw somebody with blue eyes. And I asked him the way in English and he replied to me in French. And it turned out he was Jewish. I could tell from his way of speaking. And so he took me to a restaurant that was called Levy. And it was at the Bazaar. But it wasn't in the Bazaar. You had to go all kinds of places. It's the people from the Bazaar who went there. And when I went there, I knew that Mr. Levy wasn't there. Mr. Levy had died. It was his cook who took over. He still called it restaurant Levy. And I asked him, is it cashier? He said, half cashier. So this is how things happened by chance. And it happened by chance in all kinds of places. And for me that was the great fun of it, the excitement. But when I was at the Jewish Museum in New York, after my book came out, and I was describing my encounters, it was all about the encounters where the recipes had come from. And then at the end somebody just said, well, that wasn't just after the book came out. It was more recent. Because somebody just said, do you realize that you could get all the recipes on the Internet without moving from your desk? Well, now you can. But anyhow, part of the pleasure for me was doing that. Now, when I was in America, one rabbi was quite shocked who was writing for a Jewish paper. He was also a journalist. He was quite shocked that Jews ate Arab foods. And at the same time I was giving a talk, or not at the same time, a few years difference, when my new book of Middle Eastern food came out, more recently there. It was more recent than the new book of Middle Eastern food here. So somebody there went to... I was on New York radio, and the person who was interviewing me went next door to ask the Arab Department if they could lend us some music to start... to start the program. And she gave my book. And the woman who was Palestinian was upset, terribly upset. And she said, the Jews have even stolen even our food. Now, you see, somehow the way the Jews cook reflects, and the way everybody cooks in the Middle East, reflects the shared history and culture between all the peoples there. Now, if I have time, I will say something about Spanish food. Well, if we're to have... No time. If we're to have questions before the reception. So maybe just a couple of minutes. Okay. Well, just to say that for me, Spanish food was almost the most exciting... It was the most exciting time to research Spanish food. It was a time when Spain was transforming itself into the world's greatest centre of gastronomic creativity. At the same time, the catering schools were teaching French cuisine from Escoffier's guide culinaire, even in Saint-Sébastien. But all the young men in the catering schools, all they wanted was to learn how to do sous vide, how to use syringes, how to freeze dry, caramelise, create mousses, foams, vapours, explosions. But at the same time, people were celebrating their regional cuisines and local products with enormous passion. So for me, I was researching traditional food. And so this... Well, that somehow it is such a complex cuisine, so regional. And it isn't just regional. It doesn't stick to its borders. It goes all over the place because of the history. So for me to be able to study the history of Spain through its food was very, very exciting. And the history of Spain is... Unfortunately, I haven't got time to say anything, but it was just gripping. It is gripping, but I found in Spain it is also a very sensitive subject that arises strong emotions because, like cooking, it touches on identity. And the great drama was the Muslim occupation for almost 800 years' struggle of the Christian kings to reconquer the land. Of course, there was the glory, the glory of the conquest of the Americas. But I think I'll stop now, or... One of the reasons I'm so conscious of time is because in the reception we will...